The first step to creating a form is creating a template. This template will act as a blank form and will make both creating the form now and updating it later on much easier.

 

To create a template, it’s easiest to open an existing template to work from. Even if you want to work from a blank document, it’s best to open it as a new template and work from there; that way all the file options are pre-defined, making less work for you.

 

To open an existing template, click the File menu and click New. Then, in the New Document task pane click pick a template location in the Templates section:

 

 

For our purposes, we’re going to use a pre-defined template. So, we’ll click On my computer…. to open the templates dialog box:

 

 

In this dialog box, choose the template you want to use. (For our examples, we’re going to start from a blank document.) In the Create New section, choose Template. Then, click OK.

 

Now, we’ll have a new template window open in Word. Remember that editing templates is the same as editing other types of Word documents; all your features and commands will be available.

 

Next, we need to create a table. Forms normally use tables to ensure proper alignment and consistency.

 

To draw a table, click the Insert Table button on the standard toolbar and choose how big you want your table to be:

 

 

Now, we can start laying out our form. The easiest way to do this is to type out the text of each question or field.

 

 

Note that we have used tools like formatting, merging cells, and changing column size.

 

Now that we have the basics of our form laid out, let’s save our template. This means we’ll save it as a .dot file in the default Microsoft Office template store.