Question

creating a new document based on a creating a new document based on a fill in the blanks can save you filling the blanks because filling the blanks

Answer 1

There are basically four approaches you can take:

1.

Create a protected form.

This method is great for creating forms templates, and does let the user tab from one formfield to the next; but it is useless for any other type of template, due to the huge number of restrictions Word's protection feature imposes on the user. For example, see How to enable the spellchecker in a protected document.

On-screen forms are also covered in Word's Help, under the rather misleading title of “online forms” (misleading because they have nothing whatever to do with web forms).

2.

Use a MacroButton field that doesn't actually run a macro but simply displays a prompt and allows the user to click on the prompt and type. See Microsoft's fax templates (which are supplied with Word) for examples of this. You can simply copy one of the macrobutton fields out of the Microsoft template into your own and amend the prompts as desired. To amend the prompts, select the field and press Shift+F9 to display the field codes. You'll then see something like:

{ MACROBUTTON NoMacro [Click here and type name] }