Use a Check Box control to select or deselect various options. Add a Drop-Down List control to pick an item from a predefined list. Include a Date Picker control anywhere in the document template that calls for a date. If you haven’t, think of any documents you create on a regular basis that include repetitive data-entry tasks: memos, fax covers, shipping documents, and so on. You’ve probably already come up with a thousand ways to use Word’s Content Controls. If you change this information, you must restart Word for the change to take effect. You’ll see User Name in the Popular group of settings this is the value that populates the document’s Author property. To see where the Author data is sourced from, click File > Options. Choose the Developer tab and click Properties while this control is selected, and you can set the text style or other properties for the control. Finally, choose the property– Author, for example–to insert that information into the document automatically. Click Quick Parts and then Document Property. Here’s an easy way to add that information so that it does appear: While you’re in Design Mode, select the Insert tab on the Ribbon. The document properties on the Insert tab are another form of content control–these are populated from data stored in the document.Some document properties, such as the author’s name, are stored in every Word document, but usually they don’t display in the document. In these cases, creating a template with the Drop-Down List Content Control or the Combo Box Content Control is the way to go. Populate the Drop-Down List Content Control with items for the user to choose from.With some documents, you’ll want to pick from a limited number of options presented in a list. In the last mode, the content control will appear in the document until someone has typed text in it as soon as they do, the content control will vanish, but the text typed into it will remain. On top of that, you can leave this control as is, lock it so that it cannot be deleted, or set it so that it automatically disappears once its contents have been edited. You can also elect to permit or disallow carriage returns. You can preformat the text in this control using a defined style, so that any text the user enters there will appear a certain way. The Plain Text Content Control creates a designated place for someone to enter text into a document.
Use the Plain Text Content Control as a placeholder for a user to enter text into the document. If you use styles, and the style set changes, the date’s text formatting will automatically change to match the new style set.Īdd a Content Control to Manage Text Entry
You can also use Properties to lock the content control so that it can’t be deleted, or you can add a title to the control telling the user about its purpose (“Select a date for a meeting,” for example).įinally, you can format the control with a Word style so that the date looks the way you want it to. Use the Properties dialog box to format the control (for instance, to have the month spelled out instead of being represented numerically). Click the Date Picker control and then click the Properties button (it’s in the Controls segment of the Ribbon). To see these, click Design Mode once again. The Date Picker has some handy settings you can configure. Now select the Developer tab, locate the Controls group, and click Design Mode. In Word 2007, choose File > Word Options and then click the Show Developer Tab in the Ribbon checkbox (from the Popular set of options) and click OK. In the right-hand panel, locate and click the Developer checkbox and click OK. To enable it in Word 2010, choose File > Options > Customize Ribbon.
#Microsoft word text boxes and related tools how to#
If you write lots of letters to the same few correspondents, generate electronic data-entry forms, produce documents with boilerplate language, or find yourself typing the same phrases over and over, wouldn’t it be convenient if your documents were already partially formatted and allowed you to make selections from drop-down menus instead of copying and pasting from documents you created earlier? I’ll show you how to use the Content Control tools within Microsoft Word to create templates that you can use every day.Ĭontent Controls let you add interactive elements to your Word documents, but you might not even know they exist because they’re accessible only from the Developer tab in Word’s Ribbon, and that tab is disabled by default. With interactive documents, you can choose from a range of predefined options for data, instead of typing the data from scratch each time.