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Creating an Automated Fax Form in MS Word
Do you have paper fax forms at your office that you have to fill in by hand? Wouldn’t it be easier if you could open a fax form on your computer, fill in some basic information and then just print out a neatly typed fax to run over to the fax machine? If this sounds like something you can use, read on and I’ll give you a little lesson that will show you how you can create a cool little form!
Create Your Master Template
The first thing you need to do is design your form. Since this is a form that will play the roll of the master format, it’ll need to be a template. A template is a master file from which future documents will be created. So open Word. Click File/New. You’ll be presented with the template directory. Select the Blank Document template, but before you click OK, notice at the bottom of this dialog that you can choose to create a new document or a template. Choose Template. Or, after you type a few words on the blank page, click File/SaveAs and click the drop down under Save as type and select template. This move will cause Word to switch your default save directory to your default template directory. By saving the file in this default directory, the template will then appear in the File/New template directory when it comes time to use your new form.
Design Your Form
Now you need to design your form. You can make it as simple as to just type To: and From: on each line. Or you can jazz it up a little by using a table layout. Maybe add dark shading in the label rows and use white text labels to create a reverse text look for the To, From, Date, Subject, and No. of Pages.
And with a little fancy shading in your table design and a few text box formatting tricks, you can make a pretty slick looking form.
Adding Form Fields
Now you need to add some form fields. This will provide locations for the user to jump to when they add the needed information. By using form fields, rather than allowing the user to type directly into the table cells, you’ll help to protect your beautiful formatting. Plus it’ll allow the user to easily jump from location to location by hitting the Tab key.
To add form fields, you need to turn on the Forms toolbar. Click View/Toolbars and toggle on the Form toolbar. There are several fields on the toolbar that you can use on your form, such as option buttons, check boxes, or drop downs. But we’ll just be concentrating on the Text Form Field in this article.
Click in the first location where someone will need to enter information. Then click on the Text Form Field button and a Text Form Field will be entered into the current location. Continue throughout your form and add a field into each of the locations where the user will fill in information. And don’t forget to add one for the message itself.
Note that your form fields may not look like mine, with the dark brackets around them, because those brackets indicate a bookmark. All form field have a bookmark name. I work with bookmarks a lot, so I have mine visible all the time, by clicking Tools/Options/View and clicking on the Bookmark option. If you don’t have this option turned on, your bookmarks will be flat gray squares.
The Final Touches
There’s just one final thing you now need to do to make your form work properly. You need to protect it. By protecting the document, you lock up the document so it can no longer be edited. However, the form fields will remain open, allowing users to enter information into those fields. But the rest of your form will be locked up so users cannot modify the layout of the form itself.
To protect a form, you simply click Tools/ProtectDocument. Another dialog will appear. Select Forms. If you want to ensure that a user won’t just click the same menu options to unlock the form and change it, you can add a password. Just be sure you use a password you’ll remember!
Note that if you fill out the form and unprotect it, then attempt to protect it again, all the fields will be blanked out. This is so a developer can test their form by filling it out and then clear the field easily before saving the final version. You, too, can now test your form. After it’s protected, jump through the field and fill out sample details. Make any adjustments you feel necessary and then unlock and relock it before you save the final version so your sample information will be erased and not saved into the master form.
That’s it! Now you can toss it into a shared template directory. To use the form, users will open Word and click File/New. Navigate to the shared directory tab and select your form. A new document will be created from your form. The user will hit the Tab key to jump from field to field. They will enter the needed information and then save their new document and print their final fax.
You can also let users create a shortcut to the form to keep handy on their desktop. Just have them Right Click their desktop, select New/Shortcut and Browse to where the shared form is located. Now when they double click the Fax icon on their desktop, it’ll open itself in Word and they’ll be ready to go!
One Step Beyond
If you want to add more automation to your form and really make it cool, you can add automated Input Boxes or even a Custom Dialog Box by writing some VBA(Visual Basic for Applications) programming code. Then when the form is opened, a dialog box could open asking the user to enter their information. You can have them enter the information field by field into Input Boxes, or better, add all the information at one time into a single Custom Dialog Box. Then you’d use variables as “virtual buckets” to collect the information from the form and enter it through code into the correct fields on the form.
I’ve written a series of articles on creating AutoForms that will teach you how to add more sophisticated automation to your forms. The articles start with the basics as presented here, but go through using more of the various form fields, on to custom dialogs and concludes with connecting forms to databases to pass information from a form to a database through automation. You can find links to these articles on my web site’s tutorial page at www.mousetrax.com/techpage.html.
And if you’d like to learn more about creating custom dialog boxes like the one above, I’ve written a recent article that appears in my new online magazine, TechTrax. It focuses on further details of creating this type of dialog box, as well as using variables to pass data to the form. You can find that tutorial by going to TechTrax at www.mousetrax.com/techtrax/. Click the link there to enter the current May 2002 issue. There you’ll find the Creating Custom Dialog Boxes article.
AutoForms can be quite fun and satisfying to create. And you don’t have to just create fax forms. You can create order forms, check request forms, even personnel forms. Put it this way, I haven’t found a form yet that can’t be recreated in Word.
