How to make Fillable Form in Microsoft Word

hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can create your very own fillable form using microsoft word first off what is a fillable form you can have people go in and fill out a form but they won't be able to edit the questions or the structure of the form you can use things like check boxes text fields drop down lists date pickers to build your form once someone's finished completing your form they can email it back they could print it out or you could even connect it to a database connecting to a database is outside of the scope of today's tutorial it's kind of like an adobe pdf form but it's microsoft's version of it i've included sample files today if you want to follow along otherwise let's jump on the pc and let's get started here i am in microsoft word and to be able to do this first you need a word document that you want to transform into a form here i have an order form for the kevin cookie company to follow along once again i've included a link to this word document in the description you could access this word document and then do everything that i'm doing now i've heard that the girl scouts of america make a ton of money selling cookies with these types of order forms so i really want to do the same for the kevin cookie company now on this order form i have some basic questions like what's your name what type of cookies do you want to order and then i have a few other questions as well right now it's purely just a basic word document and we need to turn this into a form to create a form we need to turn on a new tab on the top ribbon to do that let's hover over the ribbon you could really hover over anywhere on the ribbon and then right click when you right-click a context menu appears and right in the middle there's the option to customize the ribbon let's click on that this opens up a dialog where we can customize the ribbon and over on the right hand side you see all the tabs that are turned on by default there are only two that are unchecked one of them is draw and the other one is developer to create a form let's check developer to make sure that's turned on and next let's click on ok we now have a new option appear on the top tabs on the ribbon called developer and i know developer might sound a little bit scary but we're going to walk through this step by step so don't worry we're only going to use two different areas of the developer ribbon today we're going to focus on the various controls to build our forum and then at the end we're also going to use the protect section to restrict editing of our new form okay enough talk i have a form to build because we have a lot of cookies to sell the first question on the form is your full name and then i want someone to fill in their name up on the developer ribbon i have two different options for text entry i have the rich text content control and i have the plain text content control in a moment i'll talk about what the differences are but for now let's simply insert a plain text content control when i insert that onto my forum i see a field that appears that says click or tap here to enter text when i have this form item selected i could go up to properties up above and this opens up the properties i could type in a title i could type in a tag this is more important if you want to connect your form to a database if you just have people saving it or printing it out this won't matter as much down below i can define how this field appears by default it's set to a bounding box it's basically a gray box that appears to indicate that someone can fill that out if i click on this drop down i could also change it to start end tag let me click on ok so we can see what that looks like so this is just another way to let people know who are filling out your forum that they need to enter a response here i like the default option of bounding box so i'm going to leave it set to that i could also go through and i could customize what my box looks like and i have a few different controls on the bottom for now i'm going to leave those all as is and click on ok for the next question on my form i want customers to indicate what type of cookie they want and also the quantity for the type i'm going to use a checkbox i'll simply place my cursor in front of the first option and once again on the developer ribbon i have the option to insert a check box content control let me insert this and i'll go through and i'll add a check box in front of every item on this list to the right of it i want the customer to fill in the quantity that they want so here again i'm going to insert a plain text content control and i'll simply go down and add one for each individual item on this list just like before i can click onto one of these items and then i could go up above and click on properties here i'm in the properties for the checkbox and i could define what a checked box looks like and also what an unchecked symbol looks like for each one of these items that i insert onto a form i could go into properties to change the styles or different attributes of the item for the next item on my order form i want customers to indicate how they heard about us this will help us as we're deciding where we want to spend our marketing budget for this i want it to be a drop down but i also want to give customers the flexibility to insert an option if let's say we forgot it on our drop-down list now once again upping controls there are two different options there's a combo box content control and there's also a drop down list now they're both pretty similar but there's one key difference with the combo box content control a customer can also type in their own option so they're not just limited to the options that i have on the drop down list let me insert a combo box content control i've now inserted my combo box content control but when i click on this i don't see any items in here just like we did before we want to go up to the top and click on properties within properties down at the bottom i could define what items appear in the drop-down list let me type in a few items i've typed in a few different items and surprisingly we've gotten a lot of customers from tutorial videos on youtube they keep telling us they find us from tutorial videos i'm not sure who's making videos with the kevin cookie company maybe one day we'll find out we also have a super bowl commercial coming up and a sky banner on airplanes we found that's a very effective way to drive sales once you're done entering all of the options let's click on ok now when i click on this drop down list you'll see all of the options appear now i mentioned with a combo drop down list you can also click on it and a customer can type in their own option for instance here someone could go in and type in billboard we do also have some billboard campaigns going on for the next question i want a customer to indicate their preferred delivery method and just like before i also want this to be a drop down list but this time i don't want people typing in options because who knows what crazy delivery methods people will come up with i'm going to go right up to the top on the developer ribbon and this time let's insert a drop down list content control when i insert this right now there's nothing in the drop down list and once again let's click on properties and we could define what appears in this drop-down list this opens up the drop-down list or the content control properties and at the very bottom i could define what items show up in the drop-down list let me add a few items i've added a few items to the list and these are our best delivery methods you can get cookies delivered by drone we also have the pneumatic tube system and then also it's a little old school but it works extremely well we also have pigeons once you're all done click on ok now here i see my drop down list with all the items i added and unlike the previous example if i try to type something in i'm unable to type in there and i'm locked to just these options so that's the key difference between the combo box and then just the standard drop down list for the next question on my forum i want customers to indicate their desired delivery date and for this a date picker would really be perfect up above on the developer ribbon over under controls there's the date picker content control let's click on this this inserts a date picker and when i click on the drop down here i see a date picker appear here too if i go up to properties i have a bunch of different properties that i could set i could define how the date looks what look how it is what calendar type i want to have up here all of the defaults look good to me so i'll click on ok for the next question and it might be a little awkward for an order form but if someone includes a photo of themselves eating a cookie they'll get a one dollar discount we need more pictures of people eating cookie for our marketing campaigns and paying a dollar seems like a good trade-off up above once again on the developer ribbon there's the option to insert a picture content control when i insert that it inserts this rectangle here and if you click on the middle box a customer going through and filling out this form can then insert a picture from their computer the next question is another optional question and we need help coming up with a new slogan for the kevin cookie company you'd be surprised at how much time people spend brainstorming slogans for us in return for a one dollar discount for this one i want to insert a rich text content control and i'll also highlight what the difference is from the plain text here let's insert a rich text content control for the next one with the sales rep number i'm simply going to insert the plain text content control i entered some sample text into the slogan field and i also simply pasted the text down below in the sales rep number field just to show what the difference is between the two of them see here where it says deliciousness every bite i could highlight every and maybe i want to format that red and maybe i want to make a byte maybe i want to make that blue with the plain text down below let's say i want to do the same here if i set the color on every i can only set one style attribute and it all has to be the same with the rich text field you have a lot more richness and customizability over what your text looks like i'm going to undo that for now because i don't want to bias people with their slogan suggestions and here i'll simply leave it to rich text and then for sales rep number that's set to plain text now that wraps up my form i have all of my different form fields set here i have my check boxes and i am ready to go so next i want to prep my form to distribute out to our sales reps up above once again under developer within the protect category let's click on restrict editing this opens up a pane over on the right hand side where we can now restrict editing let's focus on number two here for this checkbox let's check this and then let's set it so people can only fill in the form and they won't be able to edit anything else once you select that let's start enforcement this opens up a prompt where i can set a password so you can only edit things outside of the form if you enter in the password for now i'm okay without a password so i'll click on ok my document is now restricted and as you'll see here if i try to change the title or if i try to change anything else on the form i won't be able to do that i could only fill in different values here here for example i typed in my name and i could go through and now i could indicate what cookies i want to order when someone goes through and they fill out your form they can save it and they could send it back or they could print it out and then return it to you the form is all set to go and i'm going to distribute this to my sales team i really think it's going to drive a lot of sales what do you think all right that was a quick look at how you can build a fillable form in microsoft word if you now know how to build your very own form please give this video a thumbs up to see more videos like this in the future hit that subscribe button if you want to see me cover any other topics leave a comment down below alright that's all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and i hope to see you next time bye

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 504,351

Rating: 4.9607306 out of 5

Keywords: kevin stratvert, fillable form, form, forms, microsoft word, word, microsoft word form, create form, make form, pdf, pdf form, edit, edit form, fill out form, word form, office 365, office, microsoft office, microsoft 365, developer, developer tab, plain text, check box, checkbox, drop down, dropdown list, list, lists, combo box, date picker, rich text, print, save, send, distribute, stratvert, fillable forms word, ms word, ms word form, restrict editing, password, no edit

Id: mRTQxVauzr0

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020