After you have inserted all of the form fields into your form, you're ready to finalize it. The form fields in a form don't become active and ready to receive input from the user until you protect the form. When you protect a form, you restrict the user from modifying anything in the document other than the form fields themselves . Furthermore, when a form is protected, the user can press the Tab key to move from field to field (or press Shift+Tab to move to the previous field). To protect a form without requiring a password to unprotect it, first choose View, Toolbars, Forms if the Forms toolbar is not already visible. Then click the Protect Form button on the Forms toolbar (refer to Figure 19.2). Notice that most of the toolbar buttons and menu commands in the Word window are now dim because the user can't make changes to the text or formatting of the document. When you want to make changes to the form, click the Protect Form button again to unprotect the document. If you want to require a password to unprotect the document, use this method of protecting the document instead:
The document is now protected. To remove the protection, you can either choose Tools, Unprotect Document or click the Protect Form button in the Forms toolbar. If you required a password in step 5 in the preceding step sequence, you will be required to enter it now. When you've protected your form, you're ready to save it as a template, as described in the next section.
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