We use several Word documents as templates and currently include 'guidance' text for the reader – in the form of grey, italic text – to provide guidance to the person completing the document.
Note how the grey+italic text is used to provide both guidance and example content
Problems with this approach include:
- People forgetting to delete all of this template/boilerplate text
- People using the italic+grey formatting when inputting real information because they don't change the style
We've considered including Reviewing comments as an alternative but this can be a pain and suffers from the first problem above.
I'm not sure a simple, elegant solution exists here but if there's something obvious I'm missing I'd love to hear about it.
Best Answer
You could improve the experience by putting the help text into content controls. Each controls can include default text which you would set to the help text that you want and can be set so the control (and the help text along with it) is removed when the user starts typing into it.
Using content controls should also remove the issue of the writer using incorrect formatting for real text as the default text shares a completely different style which isn't inherited when the user begins writing in the control.
When it comes to removing all help text in places where the writer may not be required to enter any information, you may need to run a macro to remove any left over content controls, however keep in mind, you would be required to do this for your original solution anyway to make sure all text is removed.