Creative Connections

There are two types of forms that you can produce in Microsoft Word:

• Forms that you want to print out and fill in manually
• Forms that you want to fill in on the PC before you print out

Forms to fill in manually

These are often forms for internal use. They are usually in the form of Word tables.

Forms that you want to fill in on the PC

These should be templates that are saved to a shared folder on the server so that you can use them over and over again. You insert special text fields into them where you want the users to fill in data.

To protect or not protect?
It is often recommended that you protect these templates so that you can move easily from blank field to blank field using the tab key. However, there are two drawbacks here:

• You cannot edit anything else on the form if it is protected
• The spellcheck isn't available in a protected form

For this reason, it is probably better not to protect the form, but to use the F11 (Next Field) key to jump from field to field