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 e-mail 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 can 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 is the option to customize the ribbon.
Let's click on that.
This opens up a dialogue 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 form, and then at the end
we're also going to use the protect section to restrict editing of our new form.
OK, 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 form,
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 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 grey 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 could see what that looks like.
So, this is just another way to let people know
who are filling out your form 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 checkbox content control.
Let me insert this and I'll go through,
and I'll add a checkbox 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 dropdown, but I also want to give customers
the flexibility to insert an option if let's say we forgot it on our dropdown list.
Now once again, up in 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 in 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
dropdown list. For the next question on my form, 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 locale it is, what calendar type I want to have appear.
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 $1.00 discount. We need more pictures of people eating
cookie for our marketing campaigns, and paying a dollar seems like a good tradeoff. 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 $1.00 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 in every bite, I could highlight every and
maybe I want to format that red and maybe I want to make a bite, 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 checkboxes 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 could only edit things outside of the form
if you enter in the password. For now, I'm OK 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.
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If you want to see me cover any other topics, leave a comment down below.
All right, that's all I had for you today. I hope you enjoyed, and I hope to see you next time. Bye.