Everything that we do today, can be done in both the free version of the form tool and the pro version of the form tool. I'm using the free version here. So if you have the pro version, you see a lot more buttons on your screen. But as long as you identify the table button and the field button, you'll be able to match everything that I'm doing here.

So this is a form that I've, chosen as a starting point, and I'm gonna turn it into a smart form with the with with the form tool.

Creating a form involves two steps.

The first step is to create a q and a table with the table button.

That's where I, as the form creator, will ask a series of questions of the form user.

And step two is to add fields to the form to fill in all of these blanks with information from the q and a table.

I'll do that now by clicking table.

There's my q and a table. And the first tip I have for you is a feature that's built into Word that's really useful for forum creators.

If you look up here in the top right area where I'm circling the mouse, there's a small button, looks like just a little line, a little horizontal line. If you aim your mouse at that button and drag downward with your left mouse button and then release the button, you'll split your word screen into two panels, which lets me keep an eye on the q and a table down here in the bottom panel panel while simultaneously scrolling through my document up here in the top panel.

That's the little hyphen that appears just above your ruler on the right hand side. Drag that down to split into panels.

Now that I've done that, I'm going to start filling in my q and a table here with a series of labels and questions.

Labels are for the computer's use and that's a, name assigned to each one of these questions. And then the question column is for human use and that's the question that I am as the form creator am posing to the person who's gonna use this form in the future.

So let me fill in this q and a table with a few questions.

In this particular form, I'm gonna be asking for a signing date. So I'll give a label date.

Date of signing is my question, followed by, asking for the name of the seller, seller's name.

And to create extra rows in the table here, all I'm doing is pressing the tab key when my cursor is sitting in this last cell. I press tab and it adds another row for me. I'll ask for the buyer's name and the property name.

And what else do I need? I need a price for the purchase price.

And finally, I have date seller, buyer, property, price. I think I've got everything now. So there's all my labels and questions.

Let's take our first diversion here. I'd like to talk about what makes a good label name. The label names I've used here were easy to type and pretty quick, but they're really not the bet they're really not the best label names that I could come up with. I'll show you what I consider to be some good guidelines for creating label names. First, your labels should be short.

That's important because it makes the end the, the form, once you're finished, much more readable and easy to deal with if your label names don't stretch across half a line or so. Keep them nice and short so that they're easy to identify in the form and easy to deal with.

Next, they should be specific.

And I haven't done a very good job of that with this form yet because this date label, if the form, eventually ends up including other dates, maybe a date of closing, a date of default, then this, label of just plain date is not gonna be helpful to identify it. So instead, I'm gonna make this more specific by calling it a date sign label, and that will, keep this date separated from any other dates that show up in this form.

Next, uniform.

It's important to make your labels uniform throughout all of your forms so that work that you do in one form can be copied and pasted into another form, with, and save you a lot of trouble recreating things from scratch.

If you use the same date sign name for every form that you create that has a signature date in it, then that, work you've done will be easily translated from one form to another.

The next one is not as obvious, alphabetically grouped.

This comes in, when sometimes you're looking at a list of labels in alphabetical order, and I like to have certain labels grouped together. I'd like all of my dates, for instance, grouped together. I'd like all the information about the seller grouped together. In this form, I've got a name of property and a price of property, and I would like those to wind up grouped together in an alphabetical listing. So I'm gonna call this one prop name and this one prop price.

That way, when this, list is sorted alphabetically, all of the information related to the property property is gonna fall together.

And the last one is also not as obvious, not real words. That means my labels will work best for me if they're not an actual word. Here, date sign is not really a word in the English language.

Prop name is not an actual word. Prop price is not an actual word. Seller and buyer though are actual words. The reason it's good to have field names or labels that are not actual words is because it makes it very easy to find those fields with words search feature.

There may come a time when I wanna identify all the places in this form where I've used the seller's name field.

And if I use a label seller name and a buyer name here, that'll make it very easy to locate and isolate all of the occurrences of that field in the form later on.

So that covers all of our guidelines for good field names here And my q and a table is now looking pretty good. I'm gonna close this and return to the form.

And another thing I like to do in q and a tables is add some helpful information for the form user anywhere where there might be confusion. Confusion. In this, date of signing question, I'm gonna press enter here to create another line, and I'm gonna type a little tip for the form user to tell them the format that I expect.

I'll go with, m d y y.

And I'm gonna right align that and italicize it to set it off and make it easy for the form user's eye to just skip past it if they don't need it. It's just an extra little bit of information that's there if they want it, but I don't wanna slow them down, so I'm gonna set it off to the right there. I'll do the same thing down here on the price of property question. I'm gonna put in a tip that says, don't type the dollar sign, and I'll put that to the right and italicize it. So if you look at the q and a table here, it's easy to identify the information that's needed. It's easy to pick out those little tips that might help me when I'm typing my answers.

Next, arranging the q and a table. Since this is an ordinary word table, I can use all of Word's built in commands to arrange it.

If I needed to add another row in the middle here, I can go to Word's layout tab, and I can choose insert below or insert above to add extra rows.

Here, I'll put another one below, and it's creating extra rows for me. I can also delete rows with the delete delete rows command.

I'll delete this one down here.

And my favorite is a keystroke.

I can rearrange rows in this table by holding down the shift and alt keys and tapping the up or down arrow.

In this case here, let me demonstrate that. I'm holding down shift and alt and tapping the up arrow and the down arrow to move that row up and down.

In this case, I'd like the buyer's name to be the first question and the seller's name next. And I'm gonna move that date of signing down to the end, and let's have the property name up there by the other names.

So it's very easy to rearrange the rows, after you've typed them all in. Shift alt up or down.

So I'm gonna shrink this down slightly so we have more room up above.

And the first field I'm gonna insert into this form is the name of the seller here. I go to the form tool tab and click the field button, and that opens our list of labels that we created earlier.

I want the seller's name in this case, so I choose seller name, click insert field, and there's the field that got inserted.

There's a couple of other buttons, in the screen that are interesting. I'm clicking ABC. There we go. The list is sorted alphabetically instead of in the order it appears down here, and the form tool will will remember your choice there so that the next time you come into this stream, it will be sorted that same way. I'm gonna uncheck that so that we go back to our original arrangement here, and I'm gonna reinsert that seller field. Seller name, insert.

The default format for an inserted field is a text field free form, And free form means whatever the form user types into the answer box down here, the form tool is gonna take exactly that and put it up here in the form.

I'll click done, and that field has been inserted. Now I'll show you a shortcut that's a much quicker way to insert fields as long as you want the default format, which is a text free form field. Here, I want the name of the property.

I'll click field and using the shortcut, I'm just gonna double click on the word prop price here. Double click and that inserts a default text free form field. I'll do the same for the buyer's name here.

Click field and I just double click on the buyer name field, and that inserts the field very quickly for me.

Now let's go to some of the other field formats.

Here, I would like the date to appear, the date of signature.

I'll click field and choose date sign, insert field, and I wanna format this as a date. If I were to leave it as a text format, then whatever the form user types down here in the date sign answer is gonna be transferred directly up here into the form. But I, as a form creator, I wanna have full control over the format of that date. So I'll treat it as a date and that gives me access to a whole list of various date formats. I'm gonna go with this basic one at the top here, and I'll click done.

Further along in this same form, I want that same date to appear, but this time in a different format.

So I'll click field, date sign, insert field, treat it as a date, which gives me access to all of these. And this time, I wanna format, first day of May twenty ten.

Done.

So that same date will be treated two different ways. I'll do a similar thing with the purchase price here. The first time the price appears, I want to spell it out in words, field property price, treat it as a number, which gives me access to a whole different list of choices.

In this case, I want words. And since it's a dollar amount, I'm gonna use one of these dollar formats down here.

And finally, I wanna treat it as a number here, Field, property price, treat it as a number and format it with, I'll go with exactly two decimals since it's a dollar amount. Notice that one of these, two decimal choices includes a comma and one does not. Choose whichever one you prefer, and I've done that.

I have just two more fields in this form and then it'll be complete. I'm gonna put the seller's name here.

Seller name, I would like that to be uppercase, and the buyer's name here, field, buyer name, also uppercase.

And I've completed my form.