In that tutorial we will talk about form fields in Microsoft Word, which are useful for preparing documents to be filled with other, extremely important in planning documents to be filled on the fly. As the name implies the form fields are parts of the document, such as name, address and other things that allow data entry with quality control, text boxes, dropdown lists, and more. To insert a new form field we should display the toolbar dedicated to these controls, the File menu -> View -> Forms. You will see a bar that contains from left to right:
- Text form field: useful to include such name or address.
- Check box: basically a check used for example to request the gender (male or female).
- Drop-down list box, a combo box to choose where the constant values, such as the types of address (street, square, …), titles (Mr., Ms., …) and another in which it appears a list of values.
- Property Control: lets you view the monitoring data, such values to fill a list box or drop down to assign the name of the control (useful for programming).
- Draw Table: needs no explanation.
- Insert Table: this seems obvious to me.
- Insert Frame: to prepare the text around the control.
- Shadow Form Field: to display the form field of gray.
- Reset form field: to restore the default values for the form field.
- Protect Form Field: To program the document should have the form fields are not protected as it should be possible to change the properties or the preparation, and when you pass a value to insert the control should be blocked.
It is clear from the above that the form fields are extremely important when you have to create a document and to enter their data to third parties, so that the preparation of the text is always unique, of course you must submit the document with form fields to set up protected ‘post.
For those who wish to have information on the actual programming used to fill in form fields on the fly with data from Word documents and manageable from an Access database, you can see an archive created by me to print invoices ( in italian ) on the fly from Access, where you create a COM object, you use form fields such as bookmarks, each with a unique name and fill the values, all done by Access.