Creating a Form in Word
By Dave Soto 6/2002
Creating a Form in Word................................................................................................................... 1
Creating forms............................................................................................................................... 3
Open a Form................................................................................................................................ 3
Turn on the Forms Toolbar............................................................................................................ 4
Starting the Form building process................................................................................................. 6
Completing the Form.................................................................................................................... 17
Creating forms
Creating a form in Word can be a daunting task. If you use a table to format your form, for example, you cannot tab extra lines in a table. This tutorial should shed some light on how to go about setting up a form without a table. Please note: this tutorial can only show you one way to do something, even though there are other ways of doing the same thing.
Open a Form
In this tutorial, I will be using a form on the
1. I have opened the form and you see it below in Fig 1.
Fig 1
Turn on the Forms Toolbar
1. Next, I will want to turn on the Forms toolbar. I will right-click in the Toolbar area, not on a Toolbar, and then click Forms from the pop-up menu.
Fig 2
2. Below, in Fig 3, is a larger version of the Forms Toolbar and what each icon is. In this tutorial, not all icons will be covered.
Fig 3
Starting the Form building process
1. Now that you can see the forms toolbar, I can now look at the document I will be converting into a form. My cursor is on the first line and I have already clicked on the Text Field icon to create a form field, as shown in Fig 4, but there are some minor problems.
Fig 4
2. In Fig 5, I have clicked on the Underline and the Form Field Shading icons to show you the difference you should see when creating a form.
Fig 5
3. In Fig 6, you can see that I have already added two more form fields below. The next form field needs a little reformatting to make it work correctly.
Fig 6
4. The next line, “Purpose of the Fund”, I will delete the four hard-return lines and then remove the Right Tab Character from the Ruler. Once I remove this Tab character, I will be able to tab repeatedly to generate three blank lines.
Fig 7
5. In Fig 8, you can see that the Tab character is gone. The line shows one tab key has been hit on the keyboard. This line is now ready to tab until I achieve the three blank lines I want for this section.
Fig 8
6. In Fig 9, I hit the Tab key on the keyboard about 39 times to get all three lines to show up. I will now delete the other hard return lines mentioned earlier. At the first tab position, I clicked on the form field icon.
Fig 9
7. Fig 10 shows that I am ready to finish adding more form fields to the next section of the document. I have also scrolled the document down to see more of the form. I also added the next form field for “Source of Income”. I will now move to the “Authorized Signatures on Check Request” section.
Fig 10
8. This section, Fig 11, looks straightforward once you realize there are no lines for anybody to sign on. In this case, I will add a tab stop where I see the hard return of the first signature, and then delete the extra spaces. Also, since this is a signature, I would not add any form fields. Once I create this line, I can just copy and paste two more lines to finish this section.
Fig 11
9. Now, I will scrolled down to see the rest of the document form. In Fig12, you can see the same type of hard return lines on the “Distribution…” and “Remarks” lines. I will remove the tab character on the right, and then tab many times to create the wrapping two lines I want.
Fig 12
10. Now, I will do the same thing to the next section and remove the tab character and hit tab many times to create the three lines. If you notice in Fig 13, I fixed the line spacing problem.
Fig 13
11. In Fig 14, I copied and pasted one of the signature lines done earlier over the three lines below.
Fig 14
Completing the Form
1. The last step involves clicking on the Lock icon and then saving the file, as shown in Fig 15. Once you do this, you can tab to each of the fields on the form and test the form fields, especially those longer than one line. That’s all there is to creating a simple form in Word.
Fig 15