Enable the Developer tab - Microsoft Word Tutorial

- [Instructor] We're going to be creating a fillable form in which users can submit to be part of our ambassador program, that is like, and enjoy, and share our products on social media. We're going to be using the fictional H Sport company which specializes in sports nutrition, apparel, and products. I've got a completely blank document here. I only have the header file, and in fact I've even included some instructions for the user on where to email the completed form once they filled it out. You'll notice that it also contains instructions for users on how to print and mail it in. We're going to be giving users both options. Now, most users will be able to use the fillable form part, but there are some users who either can't or won't be able to fill it out. And in that case, we have to allow them to be able to print it out and mail it in also. But before we can do any of that we need to enable the Developer tab here on the ribbon which is not turned on by default. To get to it, click File, all the way down at the bottom, click Options, click Customize Ribbon here on the left, and on the right-hand pane, scroll down to the bottom, and most likely the only one that you do not have checked off is the Developer tab. So place a check mark next to Developer and click OK. Instantly it will be available here. Now, it's perfectly fine to leave this on all the time. Even if you're working on a Word document that doesn't have a fillable form, the Developer tab can happily sit here doing nothing until you're ready to use it. We're going to be using the Controls area. And here's where you can see all the content controls for your document. Now, you may have noticed that I use the term content controls and not form fields, which may or may not be a term you're already familiar with. Content controls are just that, a placeholder on a document in which a user can place content. And based on these options we can control the type of content that they can place. And I'll be going over all of these types of content controls, like check boxes, combo boxes, list boxes, and text boxes, and more. It's simple, and I'm going to use my own phrase here, delightfully simple, which I'll explain in a moment. Now, with content controls, we can't do things like make fields required or only have fields appear based on the results of what people put in other fields. We can using this, which you may notice, called Legacy Forms. Here's the Legacy Form fields, and these may look familiar to you if you've used these before in older versions of Word, a shaded form field, or perhaps a text box, or a radio button, even. These are for much older versions of Word. To do those things in Word required writing code, and the entire Word document needed to be uneditable. And now there are other Microsoft apps that just do it better, like Power Apps and Microsoft Forms. So when I say content controls are delightfully simple, it's because we're here today to create a fillable form so a user doesn't have to print out a document and mail it. We know Word, we're comfortable with it. Most users have it already. And I love it when I can do something important on my tablet and just email it back.