Making a box in Word

  • Thread starter Suzanne S. Barnhill
  • Start date
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

It depends on what you want it for. If you're creating a protected (online)
form, you can use the Check Box form field. If you're creating a printed
form that users will fill out with pen or pencil, you can create an empty
box in a variety of ways (more on that later). If you're creating a document
to be filled out on the computer (but not a protected form), you may want to
use the kind of check boxes used in the fax cover sheet templates that ship
with Word. These consist of three components:

1. A MacroButton field that runs one of two macros depending on state.

2. A CheckIt macro and an UncheckIt macro.

3. Checked Box and Unchecked Box AutoText entries (these are just Wingdings
characters that have been saved as AutoText).

When the check box is empty (Unchecked Box is displayed), double-clicking on
the MacroButton runs the CheckIt macro, which substitutes the Checked Box,
and vice versa.

In order to use this type of box in your document, you need to Copy/Paste
the MacroButton field into your document/template, then use Organizer to
copy the macros and AutoText entries to your template (it has to be a
template because documents can't store AutoText entries, but you could copy
them to Normal.dot if you're just creating a document rather than a
template).

If you just need an empty box for users to check with a pen/pencil, you can
use one of several available font characters (such as the shadowed boxes in
Wingdings), or (my favorite) you can create a box using the EQ \x (box)
field. You'll find instructions for this in Word's Help under "Field codes:
EQ (Equation) field," but you can get the same effect by applying a border
to Text in the Borders and Shading dialog. What you want to put a border
around is some spaces, but the trick is that you can't use ordinary spaces:
at least one of them (the last) must be a nonbreak space. So type two or
three spaces and a nonbreak space, then apply a box border to it. You may
need to adjust the font size to make the box the size you want, but I find
this works very nicely.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
B

Bloke

Could anyone let me know how to make a little box in Word, that I can use on
a form for people to tick...

I've tried using Format Text Box, but can't get this to line up with the
words on a line, it will only be 1/2 between the lines.

Any suggestions appreciated.


thanks
 
B

Bloke

Specifically....

I'm able to make the format text box.. but can't line it up with the text,
even when I space out the lines 1.5pt.

Is there any way that I can line up this text box with the text?

Cheers
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Top