Creating a basic form

Microsoft Word 2019 has a huge range of form templates you can use or edit. To access these templates, click on the File | New option and choose to access the templates. In the search text area, type in Forms to locate all the form templates within Word 2019. Follow these steps:

1. Open an existing form or create a new form. For this example, we will open an existing form and examine its contents.
2. Let's open the form called Request for Use of Vacation.docx.
3. To fill out this form, simply press Tab on the keyboard to jump from one control to another to fill in the information required.
4. You will notice that when navigating, controls are gray when clicked, indicating that they are content controls.
5. To view the properties of the content controls, simply click on the required control and select the Properties icon on the Controls group.
6. The Properties dialog box will open, thus allowing you to make changes:

7. To delete a content control, right-click the control and click on Remove Content Control.
8. To add a control, click into a table cell (tables are the best way to construct forms as it keeps everything in line and when in a tabular form, navigating is really easy using the Tab key). Let's use the cell that contained the content control we just removed.
9. Select content control from the Controls group. For this example, we will use the Date Picker Content Control.
10. Time for a challenge! Let's see if you are able to replicate the following form using the content controls from the Controls group and some table formatting:

11. You will use the following content controls – Rich Text Content Control, Plain Text Content Control, Picture Content Control, Check Box Content Control, Combo Box Content Control, Drop Down List Content Control, and Date Picker Content Control.

12. Add the following options for the Combo Box Content Control and the Drop Down List Content Control. For the Pets Age content control, simply add your own range of ages:

Now, you know how to insert and enter data into a content control. In the next section, we will look at legacy content controls and getting the form ready for distribution.