Once you have added all your choices, go ahead and click OK and you’ll now be able to select the options from the drop-down list. There really is no reason to change the value unless you are writing Word macros and refer to the controls in code. By default, the Display Name and Value will be the same, but you can change it if you like. In order to add items to the list, you have to click on Properties.Ĭlick the Add button and then type in a name for your choice. You’ll see it says Choose an item and that’s it. Next, I went ahead and added a drop down list control to my form.

You would think the plain-text control would not allow bold, font changes or color changes, but it does. In a rich text control, you can change the font/color settings for each word individually, whereas the plain-text control will apply the formatting to all the text. So what’s the difference between a plain-text control and a rich text control? Well, not much. That last option is useful if you need someone to type in a paragraph of text. At the very bottom are the control specific options, which for the case of a plain text control, is whether you want to allow multiple lines or not. Here you can give the control a title, change the color, style the text and specify whether or not the control can be edited or deleted. Each control will have a standard set of options with custom options at the bottom based on what type of control it is. Next, click on your newly added control so that it is highlighted and then click on Properties, which is directly below the Design Mode button. Click on the Design Mode button again to exit the mode. Select the text and change it to whatever you like. You’ll see some blue placeholders appear on the left and right of any controls you have added to your document.

You can edit this text for any control by clicking on the Design Mode button that is to the right of the control icons. For a plain text control, it is Click or tap here to enter text.

In my example below, I created a table and added two plain-text boxes for first name and last name.īy default, each control has its own filler text. To insert a control, just click on it and it will appear wherever your cursor was located. The Controls section has about eight different controls that can be added to your Word document: Rich Text, Plain-Text, Picture, Building Block Gallery, Checkbox, Combo Box, Drop-Down List, and Date Picker. The section we are most interested in is Controls. On the left-hand side, click on Customize Ribbon and then check the Developer box in the right-hand list box.Ĭlick OK and click on the tab in the ribbon.

To enable the tab, click on File and then Options. Since it’s not used by a lot of people, Microsoft disabled it by default. By default, you can’t create forms in Word unless you enable the Developer tab in the ribbon.

Activate developer tab in word