Design a Form with Microsoft Word

In this section, we're going to design a form. The form we're going to design has areas for things like name, address, and National Insurance Number (this is the British equivalent of Social Security Number, if you're in the States. Other countries will have their own variations).

The form will have lots of text boxes, which you will be drawing yourself and placing into position. The form you'll design will look like this one below:

The Form you'll design in Word

For this project, you'll need the Drawing tools. To ensure that they are displayed, click on View > Toolbars > Drawing. You've met the drawing toolbar before. It's the one with the AutoShapes on.

OK, let's make a start on our form.

Open a new Word document
Click on File from the menu bar
From the drop down menu, click on Page Setup
On the margins tab strip, enter the following values:

Top 2 cm
Bottom 2 cm
Left 1.5 cm
Right 1.5 cm

Those margins will give us a nice wide page to work on. A good idea now is to give ourselves the space we need down the page. To do this all that's required is to hit your Enter key on your keyboard. Keep hitting it until the cursor is about half way down the page.

When your cursor is half way down the page, position it back up to the top, so that it's flashing on the very first line.

Type in “Personal Details”
Highlight the entire line
Add a Shade to the background (You did this in an earlier section. Click on Format > Borders and Shading. From the dialogue box, click the Shading tab strip. Select a Fill colour for your background)
With the text highlighted, choose a font, and a font size
Centre your text
Your should now have something like the green title at the top of this page

It's a good idea to add the text first, before you start adding boxes. That way, you can line the boxes up with the text, and not the other way around. To do this, we'll set up some Tab stops.

Click on Format from the menu bar
From the drop down menu select Tabs
Enter the following tab stop positions:

1.5 cm
5.5 cm
12 cm

Click OK when you've set your Tab positions. Now for the text:

Tab across to the first tab stop position by hitting the Tab key on your keyboard
Type in “Title”
Hit the tab key again to jump to the second tab stop position
Type in “First Name”
Hit the tab key again to jump to the third tab stop position
Type in “Surname”
Make the text bold