MS Word Forms made programmer friendly

November 13, 2020 6:00 PM

I have a lot of data I need to capture and validate but I am constrained to using MS Word forms. What are the best practices to generate Word forms that aren't a data disaster? I am a programmer and not averse to technical manuals. Ideally at the end of the day something else could read the form, consume the form fields, re-validate, and probably turned into JSON or YAML for processing. What is the least terrible way to do this? I would be very happy to find something like regular expression validation in Word forms these days. If there is a good book that details modern Word form development let me know. I cannot install plugins for Word. I am much more familiar with frontend/backend web form validation. PDFs could be a possibility as well if easier to use than Word, as long as it doesn't require a full version of Acrobat to fill out and save the forms.
posted by benzenedream to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

you can automate office using custom code. ( word used to have a built in vba editor, dunno anymore). for *actual coding* you can use an office sdk, visual studio code, and some flavor of .net. you can do a word add-in with the vsto tools. you can use the ms class libraries for word.

I haven't done this, but it doesn't look like brain surgery at first blush. good luck!

i work in ms stack, but not office automation at all.
posted by j_curiouser at 6:30 PM on November 13, 2020

VBA is still a thing, but I haven't used it with forms specifically.

MS documentation
posted by SuperSquirrel at 6:34 PM on November 13, 2020

If PDF is an option, that might be closer to what you’re used to. You can embed JavaScript within a PDF and do your validation that way. I haven’t worked with it personally, but the Canadian government’s passport application PDF not only does elaborate JS validation, but even generates a custom QR code entirely within the PDF viewer.

You definitely don’t need full Acrobat to fill out, save, and print the forms, but last time I tried it, you did need the real Adobe Acrobat reader (free) - JS support in the PDF viewers built in to browsers and operating systems was pretty poor.
posted by pocams at 6:14 AM on November 14, 2020