Creating Fillable Forms in MS Word 2010 - One user's experience.

In the past, my company’s forms were created in Microsoft Excel and Word (MS Office 98 thru 2003).  As the business matured and the need for protecting the forms came about, the I selected Adobe Acrobat Professional as the solution.  Adobe Pro included Live Cycle Designer for building forms.  Unlike “AcroForms” which are “flat” fillable forms, Designer creates an XFA (“XML Forms Architecture”) file that can be used to build dynamic forms.  Similar to InfoPath forms, XFA forms can have expandable fields, repeating sections, complex formulas and more.  In addition, when a form is filed out by the user it creates a very small XML file of the data in the form fields that can be emailed and stored in a database for reporting.  When the form is opened by someone else the XML data then populates the form fields on the client side.  Those forms can be filled out by anyone using Adobe’s free PDF Reader.

The downside to forms created with Designer is that XFA is a proprietary Adobe format.  My company has since chosen Bluebeam Revue as its PDF solution and the application is incompatible with XFA forms.  To further exacerbate the problem, Adobe and Bluebeam do not “play well together” when both applications are installed on the same computer.

Within the past year, the company selected an application for its enterprise financial and project management solution based on MS Dynamic GP.  The software vendor only provides three forms Out Of the Box (OOB) in its Project Management Portal (PMP) that sits on SharePoint.  Their advice was to use InfoPath (we are limited on resources for building InfoPath forms), purchase K2 (a third-party workflow solution requiring infrastructure and capital expense) or, use MS Excel and Word for creating our forms.

Considering the constraints above, the decision was made to convert our XFA PDF forms to MS Word (2010) and, to update any older Word forms not utilizing content controls in the form fields.  The old Word forms were created using “fields” that are nothing more than an underlined space or, infrequently, tables.  As a result, as the user types the fields shift, the text is not underlined because the lines move all around the page, and the forms are generally difficult, and time consuming to fill out.  Many users justifiably complain.  They find it easier to simply print the form and fill it out by hand, defeating the purpose of an electronic form.  The Excel forms continue to be used as-is.

As work began it seemed as though the MS Word content controls would be an adequate, if not elegant, solution for building our forms.  Users can open the form in Word, save it with a new name, and fill it out using the Tab bar, mouse, or arrow keys to navigate.  As more versatility, complexity, and the need to perform calculations became necessary, it was evident that MS Word is not the ideal tool for creating user fillable forms.

Word has three types of content controls, each with their own set of pros and cons.  There are the default controls, most of which have less or none of the capabilities of earlier controls.  There are Legacy controls, which have their own set of limitations.  And there are the Active X controls that are “classier looking”, but take up more real estate and make it a “macro-enabled” form; something that is generally not desired and is fairly incompatible with SharePoint 2010 for our use.  For example, the default content control deficiency includes an “all-or-nothing” formatting; if you italicize one word in a sentence the whole sentence becomes italicized.  One type of control’s properties allow you to restrict the number of characters while another does not.  Naming or tagging a default control takes up real estate.  It also prints the “Click here to insert text.” message if the field was left “blank” intentionally.  You have to delete the text and insert a space as a work around.

Tables can be added to the forms very easily.  The table’s boarders can be hidden, making it look professional, easy to view, navigate, and fill out.  Content controls can be placed in the table, but have the same shortcomings as above.

Simple formulas can be added to tables but, they are severely restricted to the simplest of equations.  ((=SUM above), below, left, or right of the result field)  To perform a more complex calculation using a formula, without using code, the user must click in the field where the result is to be shown and then hit the F9 key to “update” the field.  This is not a user friendly way to do things.  An Excel spreadsheet can be embedded into the Word form but it cannot be sized to limit the number of rows and columns.  The spreadsheet can be linked to an external source for its data, but that is not practical for our forms.

My company does not have a “Word MVP” on staff to create and maintain these forms.  Beyond the very basic, information on creating forms, how the controls work, what the property settings do, how everything acts based on changes, what the constraints are, etc., are extremely hard to find or non-existent in the public domain.*  Detailed information cannot be found in books, in tutorials, nor on Microsoft’s sites.  (At least not that myself or anyone else can find.)  It took many, many, hours of scouring the Internet to find help.  It’s as if this is “secret information” that Microsoft wants to keep for itself and their MVPs.  And, once found, there is still a lot of trial and error required to create a truly usable, professional form.  Even then, concessions will have to be made, finally settling on something that’s “as good as it gets”, leaving you wondering, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

 

*Dyan D. Chapman, Gregory Mason and Graham Mayer are very good resources.  If it relates to SharePoint, Joel Oleson, Andrew McConnell and Dux Raymond are excellent resources.  Dux is a Project Management “heavyweight”.