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Have you ever been asked to fill out a form in
a word processor, only to discover that when you
attempted to enter information, the lines on the form moved all over the page? Not to
mention that the form was difficult and time-consuming
to fill out? Most people don't realize that you
can easily create professional-looking forms in Word.
Here we show you how to lay out a form. Note you can take these forms to greater heights by
using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming code to automate the form and store
the data. But even without doing all that, you can
still create nice form documents with little experience.
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1 Create a new template
Open a blank template in Word by clicking File|New and be sure to choose the
Template option before you click OK. Turn on your
Forms toolbar by clicking View|Toolbars|Forms.
This toolbar contains special features to help you
create cool forms. Type some opening information
on the form and then ask the user to enter his
name. But rather than adding a line for the name, use
a form field. A form field provides a special place
for the user's name. Continue adding more information titles such as Address and Phone. After
each title, click the Text Form Field button to add
a field where the user enters the information. (Be sure to click File|Save to save your work!)
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2 Add checkboxes
If you have any questions that require the user to check the correct option, you can use
the Checkbox field which lets you select an item
with a simple mouse click or by hitting the spacebar.
If you've ever had to try to enter an X on a form,
especially inside some square character someone
has created on their own, you'll appreciate this
feature!
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3 Add drop-down fields
Another fun feature lets you add a drop-down field. Drop-down fields are used when
you want a user to choose, but you don't want them
to enter something other than the choices you
offer. The user can only choose an answer by
selecting one of your options. Click Drop-Down Form Field
on the Form toolbar and double-click it to open the field
options. Here you add your choices to the list (up to
25 items).
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4 Test your form
So far, you have a pretty good looking form (better than many I've seen sent to me
from so-called professionals). Now, give it a test run
to see how it's working. To get the form fields to work properly (activate), first you have to
lock your form. Locking also prevents users from changing any of the text in your form. They
only can modify text that falls within the fields
you've provided. Click the button that looks like a lock
or choose Tools|Protect Document|Forms. When you protect (lock) the form again for your
next test, all the information you previously entered
is cleared, so you can continue testing with a
clean form.
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5 Format your form
You can get a little fancy and also help protect the format of your form by using a table to
provide structured cells where the information should
be entered. If you don't want the page to look like
a table, you can remove the borders around the
table. However, a form can look nice if you add some
special shading in the title or section cells to break
up the form. Experiment by creating a table. Enter
requested title names in one cell with shade and
maybe reverse text (turn the font white) and then put
the form fields in the next cell.
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6 Add sections
In some forms, you have to enter descriptive text that needs a lot of space. Consider a police
report, for example. The top of the form has
specific fields, but the description of an incident could go
on for pages! A form field doesn't allow enough
space for this text, and once you lock your form, a
user can't type in the open spaces. To solve the
problem, you enter a section break. When you lock your
form, you can choose not to lock the second (open)
section. Click Insert|Break|Continuous Break (you choose Continuous so you don't start a new
page). Now when you protect your form, also choose
Sections and only lock the top section.
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7 Change field settings
If you use table cells in your form, you need to consider how much space a user will require.
If you don't want a large cell wrapping several
lines, double click that Text field box and limit it to a
certain number of characters. You can also limit
the style of information to a date format (04/01/00),
a phone number, or zip code. You can set a
required format and even enter default text. Double-click
the fields and experiment with optional settings.
When you are done with the form, put it in the template
directory, so you can just click File|New and
choose your template to create a new form.
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For more information on forms, be sure to check out all of Dian's articles
at this link http://www.mousetrax.com/techpage.html#autoforms.
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