Create Custom Invoice Forms for Technical Support with Ease

Custom invoice forms for Technical Support

Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today I want to show you how you can create your  very own fillable form using Microsoft Word. First off, what is a fillable form? You can have people go in and fill out a form,   but they won't be able to edit the  questions or the structure of the form. You can use things like check boxes, text fields,  drop down lists, date pickers, to build your form. Once someone's finished completing  your form, they can e-mail it back,   they could print it out, or you  could even connect it to a database.   Connecting to a database is outside  of the scope of today's tutorial. It's kind of like an Adobe PDF form, but it's  Microsoft's version of it. I've included sample   files today if you want to follow along, otherwise  let's jump on the PC and let's get started. Here I am in Microsoft Word  and to be able to do this   first you need a Word document that  you want to transform into a form. Here I have an order form  for the Kevin Cookie Company. To follow along, once again, I've included a  link to this Word document in the description. You could access this Word document and then do  everything that I'm doing. Now I've heard that   the Girl Scouts of America make a ton of money  selling cookies with these types of order forms,   so I really want to do the same for the  Kevin Cookie Company. Now on this order form,   I have some basic questions, like what's your  name, what type of cookies do you want to order,   and then I have a few other questions as well. Right now, it's purely just a basic Word  document and we need to turn this into a form. To create a form, we need to turn  on a new tab on the top ribbon. To do that, let's hover over the ribbon. You can really hover over anywhere on the ribbon  and then right click. When you right click,   a context menu appears and right in the middle,  there is the option to customize the ribbon. Let's click on that. This opens up a dialogue where we can customize  the ribbon and over on the right-hand side,   you see all the tabs that are turned on by  default. There are only two that are unchecked,   one of them is draw and the other  one is developer. To create a form,   let's check developer to make sure that's  turned on, and next let's click on OK. We now have a new option appear on the top  tabs on the ribbon called developer and I know   developer might sound a little bit scary, but  we're going to walk through this step-by-step,   so don't worry. We're only going to use two  different areas of the developer ribbon today. We're going to focus on the various controls  to build our form, and then at the end   we're also going to use the protect section  to restrict editing of our new form. OK, enough talk, I have a form to build  because we have a lot of cookies to sell. The first question on the form is your full name,  and then I want someone to fill in their name.   Up on the developer ribbon, I have  two different options for text entry. I have the rich text content control and  I have the plain text content control. In a moment, I'll talk about what  the differences are, but for now,   let's simply insert a plain text content control. When I insert that onto my form,   I see a field that appears that says  click or tap here to enter text. When I have this form item selected,  I could go to properties up above   and this opens up the properties. I could  type in a title; I could type in a tag.   This is more important if you want  to connect your form to a database. If you just have people saving it or  printing it out, this won't matter as much. Down below, I can define how this field appears. By default, it’s set to a bounding box. It's basically a grey box that appears to  indicate that someone can fill that out. If I click on this drop down, I  could also change it to start end   tag, let me click on OK so we  could see what that looks like. So, this is just another way to let people know   who are filling out your form that  they need to enter a response here. I like the default option of bounding  box, so I'm going to leave it set to that. I could also go through, and I could customize  what my box looks like, and I have a few different   controls on the bottom. For now, I'm going  to leave those all as is and click on OK. For the next question on my form, I  want customers to indicate what type   of cookie they want and also the quantity.  For the type, I'm going to use a checkbox. I'll simply place my cursor  in front of the first option   and once again on the developer ribbon I have  the option to insert a checkbox content control. Let me insert this and I'll go through,   and I'll add a checkbox in front  of every item on this list. To the right of it, I want the customer  to fill in the quantity that they want. So here again, I'm going to insert  a plain text content control   and I'll simply go down and add one  for each individual item on this list. Just like before, I can click  onto one of these items and   then I could go up above and click on properties. Here I'm in the properties for  the checkbox, and I could define   what a checked box looks like and also  what an unchecked symbol looks like. For each one of these items that I insert  onto a form, I could go into properties to   change the styles or different attributes of  the item. For the next item on my order form,   I want customers to indicate  how they heard about us. This will help us as we're deciding where  we want to spend our marketing budget. For this, I want it to be a dropdown,  but I also want to give customers   the flexibility to insert an option if  let's say we forgot it on our dropdown list. Now once again, up in controls,  there are two different options. There's a combo box content control,  and there's also a drop-down list. Now they're both pretty similar,  but there's one key difference.   With the combo box content control, a  customer can also type in their own option,   so they're not just limited to the  options that I have on the drop-down list. Let me insert a combo box content control. I've now inserted my combo box content control,   but when I click on this, I  don't see any items in here. Just like we did before, we want to go  up to the top and click on properties.   Within properties, down at the bottom, I could  define what items appear in the drop-down list. Let me type in a few items. I've typed in  a few different items, and surprisingly,   we've gotten a lot of customers  from tutorial videos on YouTube. They keep telling us they  find us from tutorial videos. I'm not sure who's making videos  with the Kevin Cookie Company. Maybe one day we'll find out. We also have a Super Bowl commercial  coming up and a sky banner on airplanes. We found that's a very  effective way to drive sales. Once you're done entering all of  the options, let's click on OK. Now when I click on this drop-down list,  you'll see all of the options appear. Now I mentioned with a combo drop-down list,   you can also click in it and a  customer can type in their own option. For instance, here someone could  go in and type in billboard. We do also have some billboard campaigns going on.   For the next question, I want a customer to  indicate their preferred delivery method,   and just like before, I also want this to be  a drop-down list, but this time, I don't want   people typing in options because who knows what  crazy delivery methods people will come up with. I'm going to go right up to the top  on the developer ribbon and this time   let's insert a drop-down list content control. When I insert this, right now there's nothing  in the drop-down list, and once again,   let's click on properties and we could  define what appears in this drop-down list. This opens up the drop-down list or  the content control properties and   at the very bottom I could define what  items show up in the drop-down list. Let me add a few items. I've added a few items to the list, and  these are our best delivery methods. You can get cookies delivered by  drone. We also have the pneumatic   tube system and then also it's a little  old school, but it works extremely well. We also have pigeons. Once you're all done, click on OK. Now here I see my drop-down list with all the  items I added and unlike the previous example,   if I try to type something in, I'm unable to type  in there and I'm locked to just these options. So that's the key difference between  the combo box and then just the standard   dropdown list. For the next question on my  form, I want customers to indicate their   desired delivery date and for this a  date picker would really be perfect. Up above on the developer ribbon over under  controls, there's the date picker content control. Let's click on this. This inserts a date  picker and when I click on the drop down,   here I see a date picker appear.  Here too, if I go up to properties,   I have a bunch of different  properties that I could set. I could define how the date looks, what locale  it is, what calendar type I want to have appear.   All of the defaults look good to me, so  I'll click on OK. For the next question,   and it might be a little awkward for an order  form, but if someone includes a photo of   themselves eating a cookie, they'll get a $1.00  discount. We need more pictures of people eating   cookie for our marketing campaigns, and paying  a dollar seems like a good tradeoff. Up above,   once again, on the developer ribbon, there's the  option to insert a picture content control. When   I insert that, it inserts this rectangle  here, and if you click on the middle box,   a customer going through and filling out this form  can then insert a picture from their computer. The next question is another optional question,   and we need help coming up with a new slogan  for the Kevin Cookie Company. You'd be surprised   at how much time people spend brainstorming  slogans for us in return for a $1.00 discount. For this one, I want to insert  a rich text content control,   and I'll also highlight what the  difference is from the plain text. Here let's insert a rich text content control.  For the next one with the sales rep number,   I'm simply going to insert the  plain text content control. I entered some sample text into the slogan field,  and I also simply pasted the text down below   in the sales rep number field just to show  what the difference is between the two of them. See here where it says deliciousness in  every bite, I could highlight every and   maybe I want to format that red and maybe I want  to make a bite, maybe I want to make that blue. With the plain text down below, let's say I want  to do the same. Here if I set the color on every,   I can only set one style attribute and  it all has to be the same. With the rich   text field, you have a lot more richness and  customizability over what your text looks like. I'm going to undo that for now because  I don't want to bias people with their   slogan suggestions, and here I'll simply leave it   to rich text and then for sales rep  number, that's set to plain text. Now that wraps up my form. I have all of my different form fields set.  Here I have my checkboxes and I am ready to go. So next I want to prep my form to  distribute out to our sales reps Up above once again under developer within the  protect category, let's click on restrict editing. This opens up a pane over on the right-hand  side where we can now restrict editing. Let's focus on number two here. For this  checkbox, let's check this and then let's   set it so people can only fill in the form  and they won't be able to edit anything else. Once you select that, let's start enforcement. This opens up a prompt where I can set a password  so you could only edit things outside of the form   if you enter in the password. For now, I'm  OK without a password, so I'll click on OK. My document is now restricted, and as  you'll see here, if I try to change the   title or if I try to change anything else  on the form, I won't be able to do that. I could only fill in different values here. Here for example, I typed in my name, and  I could go through and now I could indicate   what cookies I want to order. When someone  goes through and they fill out your form,   they can save it and they could send it back or  they could print it out and then return it to you. The form is all set to go and I'm going  to distribute this to my sales team. I really think it's going to drive  a lot of sales. What do you think?   All right, that was a quick look at how you  can build a fillable form in Microsoft Word. If you now know how to build your very own  form, please give this video a thumbs up.   To see more videos like this in the  future, hit that subscribe button.   If you want to see me cover any other  topics, leave a comment down below. All right, that's all I had for you today. I hope  you enjoyed, and I hope to see you next time. Bye.