How can I include guidance text in Word?

Example

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.

asked Oct 31, 2013 at 4:54 73 1 1 gold badge 2 2 silver badges 7 7 bronze badges What is done with the completed document, is it printed? Commented Oct 31, 2013 at 10:37 Nope - sent to the customer as a .docx (and I can't rely on people removing comments). Commented Nov 1, 2013 at 0:15

"I can't rely on people removing comments" is all very well, but there are so many things that people can put in a Word document that could reach the customer that it's difficult to imagine not having a "publish" process where (for example), someone other than the creator of the document checks the content, perhaps some standard procedures are applied, and so on. i.e. what can you rely on?

– user181946 Commented Nov 3, 2013 at 18:14

True, but it still seems sensible to try to minimise the number of things that might get left in there.

Commented Nov 3, 2013 at 22:42

2 Answers 2

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.