In this lesson, we will review a finished version of the form we are going to build in this course. Our form is a Behavior-Based Interview Questionnaire that someone on an interview team would fill in when interviewing a candidate. This is an example form that contains all the following form elements so that we can review all these techniques in the following lessons:

• Enforcing form field formatting

• Multi-level dependent drop-downs

• Required fields

• Link conditional text to drop-down selection

• Repeating form fields

• Calculating form fields

• Submit button

• Restricting/Locking/Protecting Forms

Once you complete this course, you will be able to use any of these elements on your own custom forms.

In this lesson, we will review the three categories of form fields available in the Controls area of the Developer Tab in Word. Understanding these will help you determine which category of form fields to use in your form. We will review Content Control fields, Legacy Form fields, and ActiveX Controls.

• Content Control fields were introduced in Word 2007, and they are the newest form field options in Word. They offer fields like a date picker, photo insert box, and combo boxes. Content Control form fields are best if you want to just save or print your form.

• Legacy Form fields are great, and while they have less variety of field options than content controls, you can program advanced features with them since you can bookmark them. Also, if you want to collect responses in a text delimited file so you can export data to excel, you can do that by using Legacy form fields.

• ActiveX Controls are the oldest type of form fields in Word and require macros to operate. The only one we will cover in this course is the command button so you can program a Submit button on your form.

In this lesson, we will review Content Control Form Fields. We will cover the types of Content Controls like Plain Text vs Rich Text fields, Drop-Down List vs Combo Box, Date Picker, and Picture Box. Building forms with Content Controls is easy and these field types are a good option if you are just saving or printing your form. We will cover how to hide or edit the form field placeholder text. We also cover how to build a drop-down list and how to change the tick symbol in the checkbox from an "x" to a checkmark.

In this lesson, we will review Legacy Form Fields from the Legacy Tools area. While there are three main types of Legacy Form fields: Plain Text, Checkbox, and Drop-Down List, there are numerous ways to adjust properties on these fields and program advanced functionality into your form. We cover how to turn the gray shading of Legacy Form fields on or off, and how to reset the form fields when your form is unprotected. Building your form with Legacy Form fields also allows you to save completed forms as text files that can be exported to Excel for further data analysis and reporting.

In this lesson, we will build our form template from a new blank document in Word. Starting from scratch, we will create the outline for our form template, a Behavior Based Interview Questionnaire. You'll learn how to insert tables, modify border lines, align text, and other Microsoft Word design elements. Once we have our form outlined, we insert all the appropriate form fields to prepare for the following lessons.

In this lesson, we will enforce form field number formatting using date and phone number as examples. This is where you can program a field auto format based on your specification regardless of how the user types it into the field. For example, if you want a date to display with a 4-digit year, or if you want a phone number to include parenthesis and a hyphen. This is helpful if you plan to extract your form responses to a spreadsheet so that you have cleaner data to work with.

In this lesson, we will create multiple levels of dependent drop-down lists. This is where a user selects an item from the 1st drop-down list and based on that selection, the items that appear available in the 2nd drop-down are dependent on the first selection, and then based on the 2nd selection, a 3rd drop-down displays a filtered list that is dependent on the 2nd field selection. In our form example, we have a Location field that will drive what displays as selections in the Department field and that will drive which Managers a user can choose from. You will need to save your document as a Macro Enabled document to use this functionality. To program this, we will use the VB Code found in the course workbook.

In this lesson, we make a form field required so a user cannot bypass filling in a specific form field. We will use VB code to program for a pop-up window to appear to notify the user that the field is required and allow them to enter data into the field. This comes in handy when there is a field on a form that users tend to skip or forget to fill in. The Visual Basic code for this lesson is in the course workbook.

In this lesson, we will link text to appear based on a drop-down selection. This allows elements of your form like text, images, or tables to remain hidden until a user makes a selection in a drop-down field that triggers them to appear on the document. This is a way of programming conditional text in your documents using Legacy drop-down fields and then inserting field code where we use IF and REF statements that reference a bookmarked drop-down field. Refer to the course workbook for more detailed information.

In this lesson, we will set up repeating form fields so that a user can fill in a form field once, and that field is repeated in other places in the document. This is a helpful feature for forms, and also for template letters and contracts where a name can be entered once and then has to appear multiple other places in the document. To do this, we use field code to reference a bookmarked Legacy text form field.

In this lesson, you will learn to set up auto calculations using Legacy form fields in Word. By configuring text fields as Numbers and Bookmarking them, you can then program a calculating field using your bookmarked field labels in the math equation. This functionality comes in handy if you are creating an Invoice template, for example. You can create calculations for your subtotals & taxes. On this form, we will set up a calculating field to produce an average candidate score.

In this lesson, we are going to insert a Submit button at the bottom of our form so after users fill in the form, they can click Submit to email the form back to us as an attachment. To do this, we will insert an ActiveX control command button. And remember we have to have our form saved as a Macro Enabled document in order for this to work. Also, it will utilize Outlook as the email client, so you users would have to be using Outlook to send the email.

The Visual Basic code we use in this lesson is included in the PDF Course Workbook. You'll find the code needed if your users have Outlook as their email client, or alternate code to use that can accommodate other email clients, if your users don't use Outlook. The code syntax is unable to be pasted here in this description, so please refer to the PDF Course Workbook.

In this lesson, we will review how to lock or protect all or a portion of our form document. This restricts the document to filling in form fields when the protection is enabled. This functionality protects the form template from being manipulated by users who only need to fill in form fields. It is possible to protect only certain pages or only certain sections of your form document that you designate.

In this lesson, we will test our form before distributing it. We will go through to ensure all the features we programmed, like repeating form fields, calculating fields, dependent drop-downs, and linked conditional text are functioning properly. We will also make note of any formatting or design changes we want to make on the form before we publish and distribute the form. Thorough testing is essential before deploying your form.

In this lesson, you will learn how to export form field results to Excel. You will learn how to save completed forms as text files with extracted form field data, and then how to import that data into Excel using Power Query. We will link a file folder to the Power Query so that as you save multiple completed forms in that folder, you can refresh your data in Excel and load additional results as they come in. Once you have your data in Excel, you can further analyze it through filtering, pivot tables, and more.

Congratulations on completing the Creating Fillable Forms in Microsoft Word: A Step-by-Step Guide Course! I hope you learned lots of helpful tips and techniques through these lessons so that you can create and build your own forms, surveys, and questionnaires in Microsoft Word. If you are interested in learning about other solutions for creating fillable forms, such as Excel, Adobe Acrobat, or online form builders like Jotform, be sure and checkout the "Creating Fillable Forms" playlist on my YouTube Channel (@SharonSmith). Thank you so much for joining me for this course!