Creating a Form

Before you begin the actual process of creating your form, think about how you want your form to look. Do you want to use a table so that the form can be arranged in rows and columns ? If so, do you want the table gridlines to be showing or not? Or perhaps you want your form to look like a standard document containing paragraphs of text? Will your form only be filled out in Word, or do you want to print it out and have users fill out hard copies as well?

When you have a general layout in mind, you're ready to sit down at the computer. The process of creating a form involves four general steps:

1. Add all of the text and formatting to your document.

2. Insert the form fields and define how they will behave.

3. Protect the form.

4. Save the form as a template.

The next four sections describe these steps in more detail.

Word's form fields do not allow you to specify tab order that is, you can't specify the order in which the fields are activated when the user presses the Tab key. Rather, the Tab key activates form fields in the order in which they appear in the document. It's a good idea to keep this limitation in mind when you're designing your form.