Fillable Forms In Word Form How To Create A For Mac
Content developed on Office 2016; however applicable to Office 2019,2013, 2010; desktop and Office 365 versions; Windows 7, 10; Post updated on: September 2018 Here’s a question from Deanne: I need to create a short survey to send to my office coworkers. I know that i could probably use an online solution such as Google Forms or Microsoft Forms.
However in my case, i would like to design the form and then send it as an attachment to my colleagues via Microsoft Outlook. I would like to use Word or Excel itself to create my fillable form but i don’t find the menu item that allows me to go ahead and start working on my form layout. Any hints are appreciated. Custom forms allow us to capture user feedback in Microsoft Office applications in a relatively neat way. In this post, we’ll teach you how you can easily create interactive custom fillable user forms and add them into your Microsoft Outlook emails, Excel workbooks and Word documents. For each office application we’ll provide some basic examples that highlight the use of this capability.
Feel free to leave as a comment in case of questions. Forms in Outlook 2016: Before we add our form to Outlook emails, we’ll need to enable the so-called Developer tab:.
Open Microsoft Outlook. Now right click the Ribbon and select Customize Ribbon. Click on the Developer Check box and select OK. Now from the Ribbon, select Developer and hit Choose form. Now go ahead and design a form from the standard forms library. Microsoft Outlook ships a nice collection of forms related to the main Outlook objects that you can select and jumpstart your form development off of. Special Bonus: the Free PDF version of our Outlook tips and Tricks guide.
Excel 2016 fillable forms In this section we’ll learn how to quickly define a data entry form that can help you populate a spreadsheet table. If your job involves significant data entry job, this tutorial could really help.
Follow through for the entire procedure for creating a simple form in Excel: Setup you Excel data entry form. Open Microsoft Excel. Right click the Ribbon and select Customize Ribbon.
In Choose Commands from drop down box, Select Commands not in Ribbon. Search for the Form command. Now in the right hand side, hit the New Tab button. This creates a new tab in the Ribbon that will allow you to place the Form command under it. New highlight the new tab you just created and hit Rename. Call the tab Form.
Now highlight the New Group (Custom) group that was automatically created once you created the new tab. Now highlight Form in the left hand side and hit Add.
This will add the Form command to the new tab as shown below:. Select OK. Using your form. Now in your spreadsheet, define your table header as shown below. In our case, we added the Name, Gender etc’.
Highlight your table header and, hit the Form tab and hit on Form. Your custom fillable form is automatically created and can be used to populate the table as shown below. The form can be now emailed to your Outlook recipients as needed. Data entry form capabilities It’s worth noting that the custom form has some interesting built in capabilities for data entry:.
New: add new record to the table. Delete: remove records from the table. Navigate the table according to field value using Find Prev and Find Next. Criteria: Search and Filter the table according to predefined values. Note: Obviously, you can build much more fancy forms in Excel, equipped with every possible data input control. Today, we wanted to show you the basics, in case of questions, feel free to leave us a comment.
Word 2016 forms:. Open Microsoft Word. Right click on Ribbon and select Customize Ribbon.
Hit the Developer check box and select OK. Enter your Header text and make it to convert text into Table. Use the Content Control tools and prepare the texts accordingly to your Header texts. Click on Restrict Editing and select Editing Restrictions. Click on the Check box and change Filling in Forms from the drop down box. In Start Enforcement, Select Yes, Start Enforcing Protection.
Enter a Password and Retype Password for the Protection. Can i use an Excel or Word form template? If you want to jump start your form development process, you can use a canned template delivered by Microsoft Word (or Excel). Kindly proceed as following: Windows users:. Open Word (or Excel). In the template search box and type “form”, then hit the magnifying glass icon. Microsoft ships several useful online form templates including: Volunteer, travel expense, meeting summary, cash donations, membership, job description, field trip, food sign up reports and more; which you can use in Excel or Word.
Look into the available templates, once found double click your chosen form template. Customize your template according to your needs and save it on your computer or OneDrive. MAC OSX users:. Open Word (or Excel). Hit File and then New File from template. Search for the available template using the right hand side search box. Double click the template.
Customize the layout and Save. Got additional questions on the topic? Look into our.
Enable the Developer Tab In order to create fillable forms, you will need to start by enabling the developer tab by clicking on the “File” drop-down menu and then choose “Options.” Open the “Customize Ribbon” tab and select the “Main Tabs” option under “Customize the Ribbon.” Now you will need to select the “Developer” box and press “OK.” Once you have done this, you will notice that an additional menu has been added to the top of the screen with several new developer options. To Template, or Not to Template? There are two main options to get started with your form creation. Option one is easy to use if you can find a template that suits your needs. To find templates, Click on the “File” menu, select “New.” You will see many premade templates available for download.
Simply click on “Forms” and look through the selection of templates to find one that suits your needs. When you have found your template, just download it and edit the form as needed. Since that is the easy way and you may not be able to find a template that fits your needs, we will discuss the best way to create forms from scratch. Begin by navigating to the template options again, but instead of selecting a pre-made form, select “My Templates.” Now you will need to click the “Templates” check-circle and then press “OK” to create a blank template. Lastly, press “Ctrl + S” to save the document. We will call it, “Form Template 1”.
Populate the Form Now that you have a blank template, you are ready to start adding information to the form. The form we will create in this example is a simple form to collect information about people who fill them out. First, you will need to enter the basic questions. For this tutorial, we will try to get the following information:. Name ( Plain Text Response).
Age ( Drop-Down List). D.O.B.
( Date Response). Sex ( Check Box). Zip Code ( Plain Text Response). Phone Number ( Plain Text Response). Favorite Primary Color and why: ( Combo Box). Best Pizza Toppings ( Check Box and Plain Text Response). What is your dream job and why?
Limit your answer to 200 words ( Rich Text Response). What type of vehicle do you drive? ( Plain Text Response) Click on the “Developer” tab which you added earlier and under the “Controls” section, choose “Design Mode” to begin creating different control options. If you want to see what it looks like in action, remember to deselect the “Design Mode” option. Text Sections For any answers that require a text based answer, you can add text sections. You will do this by selecting the Rich Text Content Control (allows users to edit formatting) or the Plain Text Content Control (only allows plain text without formatting) option. Let’s enable a rich text response for question 9, and then a plain text response for question 1, 5, 6, and 10.
Remember that you can edit the text in the content control boxes to match the questions by clicking in them and typing as seen in the image above. Add a Date Selection Option If you need to add dates, you can add the “Date Picker Content Control.” Let’s Use this and add it to question 3. Insert a Drop-Down List with Options For questions that only allow one answer such as numbers (question 2), a drop-down list is handy. We will add simple list and populate it with age ranges.
Fillable Forms In Word Form How To Create A For Machine
You will need to add the content control box, right-click on it, and select the “Properties” option. Next, click on add to add age ranges. When you are done, it should look something like this (Design Mode Disabled). Alternatively, you can add a “Combo Box,” which will allow you to add any options you want, as well as allow users to enter additional text if needed. Let’s add a combo box to question 7. Since it is a combo box, users will be able to select an option and type why they like the color. Add Check Boxes For the fourth question, we will add check box options.
You will first enter your options (male and female). Now you can add the check box content control after each option. Repeat the process for any other questions that require one or more options. We will add check boxes to question 8 as well. We will also add a plain text response box for any toppings not listed.
Wrapping Up The completed blank form should look like the images below depending on whether you have design mode enabled or disabled. Design Mode Enabled Design Mode Disabled Congratulations, you have just learned the basics of creating interactive forms.
Feel free to our completed sample form if needed. You can send the DOTX file to people and when they open it, it will automatically open up a normal word document that they can fill out and send to you since the template is automatically applied. Image Credit: on Flickr.