TheFormTool

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on February 28, 2012

TheFormTool is a free add-on for Microsoft Word. With it, users can create attractive, personalized, professional forms and documents inside Word, using regular Word commands. It also adds many unique capabilities, such as the ability reuse old files as new forms. It's particularly useful to physicians, attorneys, engineers, administrators, and self-employed people--anyone who needs to create clear, legible, archival-quality forms, documents, letters, and records. It's a simplified version of a complex (and expensive) pro tool, but TheFormTool is fully functional and completely free, with no expiration date. TheFormTool requires Microsoft Word 2007 or better, though it's compatible with most documents created in earlier versions. We tried it in Word Version 14 in Office 2010.

We clicked the extracted executable file to open TheFormTool inside Word. The program's quick-start guide includes instructions to enable editing and other setup measures. We highly recommend reviewing the PDF-based quick start guide included in TheFormTool's download. Following the guide, we started by creating a new, blank form with signature and date of birth fields. From TheFormTool's tab, we added a Q&A Table, with entries asking for the name and birth date of the signer. Next we placed our cursor on the document at the exact space we wanted the signature field, and clicked Field. A simple wizard let us add the field in various forms using the Fields, Lists, and Conditions tool. We could edit our headers and make other changes. When we were ready, we clicked Insert Field, and TheFormTool created our signature and DOB fields. Saving the form let us use it as a template as often as we needed, either by entering data and clicking Fill or by editing and modifying it to create new or updated forms. TheFormTool works equally well with forms saved as documents (.docx) or templates (.dotx) but we recommend using the template format since it creates a new document each time, making it impossible for a user to accidently modify the original form.

That's just the start of TheFormTool's capabilities. It's one of the most capable Word add-ins we've tried, and one that adds the most to Word's already considerable capabilities.