Calculations in Word

[shanzek]

Our human resource department is designing a word document for reviews. They want it to work like this:

Section 1                               weight         value        score
Employee is worthwhile...                  10%             5             .5
Employee does blah blah...                 20%             4             .8
...
Total                                     100%                          3.2

where the weight is a percentage entered in by the reviewer, the value is a value between 1 and 5, and the line score is the percentage times the value...

There are 6 sections; each section the weight must equal 100%.

THey gave me the word document they started with, and they have text boxes for the weight, value and score.

Can anyone offer up some tips / pointers on the best way to implement this? Should I redesign it to use embedded Excel functionality, or can it all be done with word and VBA?

THis would be in Office XP.

Thanks
Steve

[alex_read]

Personally this looks to me as though it would fit nicely into Excel, I know it's a bit of work to reproduce it initially but I can't see why they tried this in Word in the first place myself...

[shanzek]

The reviews were originally in Word, which were printed out and given to supervisors to fill in with pen/pencil. The reviews were then turned in to Human Resources, totalled manually, and then raises (or lack of them) were allocated based on the scores.

For some jobs, parts of the review were not applicable, so they wanted to give the managers to assign weights to each section based on how important the manager perceived that duty to be.

And the new 'work flow' was to be that a manager fills out the form, assigning weights and values for an employee, then prints out the automagically totalled form to give to HR.

My first thought was that it was more suited for Excel, at least the weight and values and calculation part. My boss argues that Word has much better text features and will make for a more professional looking document.

If I had more time (they want this ready by March 1st...) I'd design it to run off a database, and do a front-end with VB. The manager would select a position, the program would retrieve the default weights for the questions, and the results would be updated to a table for HR to use. But maybe next year... and maybe web based rather than vb...

But for now I'm stuck with Word. I'll be making a trip to Barnes and Nobles tonite to look for a good book on VBA and Macros. Any suggestions on books would also be appreciated.
Thanks
Steve