Welcome to 2010! One of my goals is to get back into blogging a bit more. With that in mind here is my first post of the new year. Recently I have been filling out a lot of forms and I am just sick and tired of forms that are formatted so poorly! As a heads up, I will be doing a webinar in the near future on how to properly format word processed documents so they look good in almost any word processor. In the meantime, here is a little trick that you can use in OpenOffice Writer or Microsoft Word that will allow people to answer short fill in the blank type questions and not mess up your formatting or have to use tables. This little trick entails using tabs in the correct way.

Tabs are probably one of the worst banes in the word processing world, but if used correctly they can really simplify the process of creating forms that use lots of fill in the blank type responses. So here is how it is done:

1. Open up a new document
2. Turn on non-printing characters so you can see where your spaces and tabs are located. You can do this in OpenOffice by clicking on the "View" menu item and select "Nonprinting Characters" or hold down the "Ctrl" key and then press F10. There is also a button on the tool bar that does this same thing. If you move your mouse over the buttons a tool tip will pop up and tell you what the button does. Amazingly enough the name of the button is "Nonprinting Characters."
3. Hit enter a couple of times.
4. Type "Name:" (no quotes)
5. Press the space bar once
6. Click on the Underline button or hold down the Ctrl key and then press U
7. Press the space bar once. Now you have a single non underlined space and a single underlined space.
8. Now press the Tab key once. Your underline covers the entire tabbed area.
9. Turn off underline by clicking the Underline button or hold down the Ctrl key and press U
10. Press Tab one more time. This tab shouldn't be underlined.
11. Type "Date:" (no quotes)
12. Press the space bar once
13. Click on the Underline button or hold down the Ctrl key and then press U
14. Press the space bar once. Now you have a single non underlined space and a single underlined space.
15. Now press the Tab key once. Your underline covers the entire tabbed area.
16. At this point things probably don't look too good, but now here is the trick to make it look great. Find the Tab bar at the top of your screen. It looks like a ruler with a bunch of upside down T's on it.
17. We want to give the user plenty of room for their name so click on the tab bar in the area of the number 4. Suddenly your name line should jump across the screen and end where you just clicked.
18. Now we want about a half an inch between the name line and where date starts. Click on the Tab bar at about 4.5 inches. The space between the name line and the date should now be about a half an inch.
19. Now we need to lengthen the "Date" line. Click on the tab bar around 6.5 inches. The "Date" line should now jump out to the spot where you clicked on the Tab bar.
20. Done!

Now lets test to see if it works correctly. With your mouse click left of center on the "Name" line. The cursor should jump to the beginning of the line. Start typing your name and it appears that your name is being typed on the top of the line. Do the same thing on the "Date" line and it should behave in exactly the same manner.

The biggest caveat of this process is that if somebody puts more text than the line can fit it will kick the tabs over one and totally mess up your layout. The key is to put enough length on the line so people have plenty of room to type the required response.

Happy form building! If I get some time I will see about making a screen capture video of the process.