Creating
Simple Forms in Microsoft® Word
By
Gail Van Landingham
Has a friend ever stopped by and shown you a technique that was immediately useful in your job? Here's a suggestion you might find useful if you need to collect a lot of information about people: try using Word forms and import the information you receive into a database or spreadsheet. Learning to do it takes only a few minutes.
The basic
process is five steps:
The Process
Before you start, sketch out your form on paper.
- Create the form.
- Open a new Word document.
- Display the Forms tool. Click View > Toolbars > Forms.
- Turn on field shading so you can see your form fields.
- Add one of the form fields. You can select Text, Checkbox, or
Drop-down from the Forms Toolbar.
When you finish, your form will look like this.
- Lock the form.
Protect the form so the users can enter data only in the fields.
- Click Tools > Protect Document.
- Select Forms.
When you finish, your form will look like this.
Save the form.
- Test the form.
Give your form to a few friends and ask them to complete the fields and send the form back to you. This is a small usability test.
- Save the form.
- Save the data as a CSV (comma-separated value) file.
- Click Tools > Options > Save
- Select Save data only for forms.
Word saves the file with a TXT extension. Each field ends in a comma.
- Import the form.
Import the TXT file into a database or spreadsheet. For details, see Online Help in your database or spreadsheet program.
More Information
An organization
for forms design
Form designers have their own organization: the BFMA (Business Forms Management
Association), whose mission is to "address the unique educational and
networking needs of forms designers and managers" (www.bfma.org).
Advanced
form features
For details on more advanced form features in Word, see "Using Word's
User Forms," in Intercom, June 2003. This is on the STC site's
members-only password-protected area.
(http://www.stc.org/). Click the Members Only tab > Pubs search.
New developments
for forms
Microsoft Office 2003 has built-in XML capability. For one review, see
"Microsoft Reboots Office" by Jon Udell. He says, "XML
capabilities in Word, Excel, and InfoPath help bridge the gap between
desktop documents and databases, and give enterprises a reason to upgrade."
(http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/10/03/39FEoffice_1.html?s=feature).
