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Creating Forms in Word 2003(5/12/2008 newsletter)
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Creating Forms in Word 2003
Happy Monday and hope you had a wonderful weekend, especially you moms out there! Hope your family spoiled you on Mother’s Day. I am happy to report that I was sufficiently pampered, especially by my daughter, who is always thoughtful beyond measure. She created a hand-made book full of touching quotes about mothers, complete with a beautiful one she created herself. She even added some homemade coupons, such as "Good for one activity together". If you are the parent of a teen, you know that's a biggie!
Enough about me! Reader Karen Haskins wrote with a great question. Karen writes:
My question is if I want to create a form in Word 97-2003 format for fill in but protecting items so that the form itself cannot be edited, how do I do this?
Forms are great, since you only need to develop one once and can then use it repeatedly. Protecting a form will allow people to be able to type in the fields you want, but not change the permanent fields. To create a form in Word we will use the Forms toolbar, which you can get to by going to the View menu, pointing at Toolbars and clicking on Forms.
Enter any text you want on the form, including instructions, titles, etc. Format these to your little heart’s desire. The next thing we will do is create accessible text edit fields. Put your cursor wherever you want the person to enter text (for example, you might have typed “Name:” as a permanent field, so you might enter a space or tab after it and put your cursor there). In the Forms toolbar, click on the Text Form Field button. A grayed-out area will appear where your cursor is; this will be the editable field. You can now right click the field and go to Properties. Under Type you can choose Regular Text, Date, and more. You can set a maximum character length and even format the text. You can also add Help Text, which will prompt users to fill in the field correctly.
Play with some of the other options on the Forms toolbar, like the Checkbox and Drop Down form fields. When you have it how you like it, click on the Protect Form button so that users can edit the fields you want them to and not those you do not.
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