Protecting your documents, and sort of just a general workflow for creating protecting your forms rather for creating forms and saving them and, keeping track of them in a way that they're not, lost or damaged either by you or by your end users, you being the author.

So let's just say we're creating a form here, and you'll add a questionnaire. And right about now, just as you're at the very, very beginning to this thing, you should save your form even if it's empty or virtually empty at this point. When you save it, be sure to click save as so you can choose to save it as a word template.

Saving forms as templates is the first step in protecting your forms, because when people use those templates to create documents, they'll be much, much, much less likely to overwrite the form with the finished document that they create. That's why you're saving it as a template. So I've chosen the word template, and I'm gonna save it initially to a location that only I have access to. This will just be my work area, my forms in progress. I'm gonna make a folder on my desktop to use as a forms in progress folder, forms in progress.

And I'm gonna save this form that I'm working on there, and I'll call it it'll say this is, an intro letter.

Then, also in the early stages, another thing I like to do is think about, when people use this form and then they go to save the resulting document, what would I like to encourage them to name that resulting document? If I, as the form author, provide a good default name, which will pop up automatically when they save this thing, then it'll it'll really contribute to consistency throughout the office as people go looking for documents. They'll all tend to be named similarly with good descriptive names.

So to encourage that, I, as the form author, can go into my file info menu here.

And over on the right, there's a slot for a title.

If I type a title there, like, intro letter, Let's say close that.

Let's go back to my form and save that. Then every time someone uses this form and, hits the save button to save their results and document, it's gonna pop up with the default file name intro letter, and they will likely have not just, hit save without changing that, and so you'll end up with a a good consistently named finished documents.

Then I will add let's suppose in this particular form, I'm gonna need to know the name of the signer.

Who are you?

And that's going to be part of the letter up here.

I am minor name.

And as you're working on the form, save it as you go. I'll hit the save button there. Now everything I've done so far is saved. And periodically, you know, if this is a complex form, you might be working on it even over a span of days.

Periodically, save it, with an incremental number.

I should have really saved the first one as intro letter o one. I'm gonna do that now. Instead of just doing a regular save, every once in a while, I'll do a save as and type a number on the end. We'll make this o two save.

And when I saved that first one, I should have put an o one on it just as a starting point.

And then, now let me go back into o two here. And then as you progress through the formatting more and more stuff, over a span of hours or days, you might stack up several different iterations, o one, o two, o three, o four. This is good because, eventually, you're gonna do something horribly wrong, and you're gonna wanna back up and go back to something that was working better. And if you do this, you'll always be able to revert back to something that was working properly and you were happy with and not lose more than, some amount of time of work.

Just a really good process that has come in handy for me many, many, many times, to have a good, periodic incremental backup of multiple versions of this thing until you get it finished.

Then at some point, it's gonna be done.

At that point, you're probably going to turn off that, leftmost column there by clicking show hide. So you get a nice attractive looking questionnaire there, and you will save it in its final form ready for people to use.

So I'm gonna do save as one more time.

And, for my final, I'm just gonna get rid of the number on the end, and that's how I'll know which one of these various versions is the one that I actually wanna publish out for everyone to use. So by the end of the process, whether it's, you know, a day's work or several weeks' work, I've got a finished form here that I'm ready for people to use.

Keep that in your own local area that other people do not have access to.

It could be it doesn't have to be on your desktop. It could be on the network somewhere, but make sure it's an area that only, you and and appropriate people have access to. That's not the one that you're gonna make available for people to use.

Somewhere else, you should have and on this computer, I've got on my c drive find it here.

See, I've got a folder for forms, which is where and I've got, the forms subdivided into various categories.

But this is the place that I give access to other people so that they can come here and actually use the forms that I've created. So I'm gonna add my new form, my intro letter, to this area by copying it, not moving it, but copying it from my my private area into this shared area. Now people can use the form here. When they double click on it, they'll get a copy of that. That's because it's a template, not a document. So it opens up a copy of that template, and they're ready to create their own document here. When they click the save button to save their finished product, notice that it is giving them that nice default file name that we assigned by filling in the title field.

So that's one, stage of protection. Just the fact that we have made it a template and the fact that we've kept our own copy of it means no matter what they do on their end, the form users are never gonna be able to obliterate our work because we've got our own copy of it somewhere. Now here's a couple of, additional steps you can take to protect things. At this point, they could still come in here. If they know how to right click and choose open, they could open this form and make changes to it, which I might not want them to make. Or they could simply delete it, maybe accidentally, and then people wouldn't have access to it anymore, and I'd have to copy another copy from my area into the shared area.

So what else can we do to protect this? One thing is in your shared forms folder, here it is on my c drive right here, but this would probably be on your network somewhere, you can, assign privileges to that entire folder so that only certain people have the ability to edit its content.

You do that by right clicking on the do this? By right clicking on the folder and choosing properties and going to this security tab. Now this is gonna vary depending on what sort of a network you're on and how the permissions have been set up and how much access you have been granted.

But someone on your network, if it's not you, it's the IT person, has the ability to go into this security tab on this folder where all your shared forms are stored and assign the, privileges here in such a way so that general users, everyone in your office, has limited access. They're only able to read and execute these files or list folder contents or read the files. They cannot modify the files. They cannot create new files.

They can't delete files and so forth.

So general users get a restricted set of privileges, and then you can ask the, IT person or you can do yourself, you can add yours yourself to this list as an administrator, and an administrator gets full access. So you can come into this group of forms anytime you want to modify them, update them, rename them, move them around, do whatever you want because you have full privileges. That's very handy if you set it up that way because then, everything you put in that area is automatically restricted, and only you can manipulate this stuff.

If you don't have easy access to that, if you, don't have a IT person who's who's willing to grant you those privileges and restrict everyone else, you can still do some protection here. You can go into, the folder and find a particular form here. Let's go with the intro letter we created a minute ago.

You can right click on that individual file. Remember, before I was right clicking on a folder. This time, I'm right clicking on the file itself, the template.

Right click on that template and choose properties, and check this read only checkbox right here.

That's gonna add one more level of protection to it. I'm gonna click apply and okay. What that's done is it has made it so even if someone does right click and choose open here, they're still just gonna get a read only copy of this form.

If they make some changes to it and hit the save button, rather than saving back over the top of your form, it's gonna force them to save it as a different file. So it doesn't matter what they do to it, they'll never be able to crash the form that you saved there because the form you saved has been marked read only.

That means when you personally do want to go back and make changes to that form, you will have to first right click again, choose properties, and uncheck that read only box.

Click apply and okay. And now I, as the form author, can get back into that form and actually revise that it's no longer in the read only, setting.

So that's another layer of protection you can add.

Next, let's see. Did that.

Did that. The hassle of that, of course, is is that you have to do it individually on each form, and you have to remember to go back and undo it when you do need to make changes to the form. It also doesn't stop people from deleting forms. So the first method is superior.

Now another thing that you can protect is your, master lists and folios. All that protection that we've added to the individual forms here doesn't do anything to protect any master lists and folios that those forms depend upon. There's nothing to stop someone from coming in here and getting curious about, oh, what's what's a master list? And they open up your master list screen, and they browse amongst all the master lists you've got lovingly crafted, and they start saying, oh, I know some information I can add to here, and they start adding things on here. You can prevent that, if you own Docsara.

Docsara, includes this feature by clicking going to the, computer of the form user who you want to restrict, maybe do it during lunch when they're away from their desk, and click options, authoring.

And this says if you restrict authoring, this user on this computer will not be able to use any of Docsura's form author's tools.

And I have to type a password here. I'm just gonna use the word password for the moment so that I don't forget it. Password.

Type the word, the password you want twice, and then click restrict authoring.

It's giving me a warning. Are you sure you wanna do this? I'll say yes.

Now the form author tools, which are generally in this area on the toolbar, are restricted so that if the form user comes along and says, oh, what's this questionnaire button do? They just get a message that says this has been restricted.

Same for if they try to go into your master list screen, if they try to go into your folio screen.

All the stuff that you don't want them to mess around with has been disabled.

If they ever graduate to a point where you will want to give them access again, you can go back into that authoring screen, type in the password that you remember from before, and unlock authoring, and now all of their authoring buttons are functional again.

In general, I you might feel a little weird about doing that. But for users who are just intended to use forms, they really won't respond badly to having just one chunk of the ribbon disabled there. It just stops them from, wasting time poking around in there, makes it more clear to them that they are intended to use these three sections over on the left and that this area is just hands off. And it it will simplify their life. You can think of it that way.

Then finally, we occasionally get people asking, I've created this form. It's perfect. I just want people to fill in the answers and generate the finished document, and I don't want them to touch anything else. That is they just need to answer the question, and it's done. I don't want them to alter anything in the finished document except for the answers to those questions.

For that extreme draconian approach, you there is something you can do. I'm gonna close this. It's more trouble for you, but it is doable.

What you would do in that case is here's that intro letter form that we created. I'm gonna delete that from my shared form area. I don't want to give my end users access to the form itself.

Instead, now I'm back into my intro letter that I've got in my own private area here. I'm gonna open that up, and I'm gonna use this again is a, no. This is this is in both the form tool and in Docsara. I'm gonna use a feature called prepare to share.

You have a finished form that's all ready to go, and you click prepare to share. And it walks you through six steps here that prepare this, questionnaire for sharing. First, it's gonna check, links and sources. This is a a simple form, so it's not linked up to any master lists and folios.

If it were, it would give me some steps to go through there. Step two is it's gonna check on series answers and grids and make some suggestions about that. Step three, it's gonna check the checkbox to make sure they're compatible with various versions of Word. Step four, the content, it's gonna suggest that I remove the content from this questionnaire that I'm preparing, and I'm gonna do that now.

I'm gonna click the remove content button.

Step five, it's gonna check on the labels to make sure they're hidden. They are. And step six, I click finish, and it tells me the q and a table is now usable by people who do not own Docsara or the form tool. After responding to the question, they need to return the q and a table to you for form completion.

I click okay. So what it's done, it's given me nothing but a questionnaire. The body of the form itself has been removed. The questionnaire has been prepared in a way that's gonna make it usable even by people who do not own the Form Tool or Docsara, and it's ready to go.

Now I don't wanna hit save at this point. If I hit save right now, I'm gonna obliterate my intro letter form.

So instead, I'll click file, save as, and I'm gonna save a version of my intro letter form that only includes the questionnaire.

Questionnaire, only.

Save that. So now in my own little private area where I keep forms that I'm working on, I've got several iterations of this form as I was working on it. I've got the finished form that I've created, and I've got this question questionnaire only version, and that's the one I'm gonna copy and put into my public area for everyone's access.

Paste.

Now when the end user comes along to use the intro letter form oh, I forgot to do one thing here. In my intro letter questionnaire form, I'm also gonna put some instructions at the top for them, like, answer these questions, then send the results to me, and I will return a finished form to you. So lot more work for you as the form author because you're gonna have to run the form each time someone needs to use it. But if you need if you need to lock down things to this degree, this is the way it's done. So I'm gonna save that, close it, and that's the version that I'm gonna copy and paste into the shared area.

Paste.

So now the form user comes along.

They, as instructed, answer the questions in the questionnaire, and they send the results to you.

You open up the form that they sent you.

You save the answers that they typed into it by clicking save load, and I will create an answer file here called sample.

Oops. I've already got one named sample. Let's create one called, my sample.

And you'll save the answers that they sent to you into that answer file.

You'll close the document that they sent to you.

You'll open the questionnaire that it corresponds to I'm sorry. Open the form that it corresponds to from your own personal stash of forms, load in the answers that they sent, and click fill.

You'll also petrify.

Now we have a finished document.

And because I really don't want those people to make any changes to this form, to this finished document rather, I'm gonna do one other thing. I'm gonna click file, save as, and instead of saving it as a Word document, I'm gonna save it as a PDF.

I can put this wherever I like. I'm gonna just put it on my desktop for the moment. Intro letter p PDF.

Save.

Close that.

Now I have a PDF generated from their answers.

And, of course, it's only as edit editable as a PDF is editable, which is not much. And I can send them that finished intro letter PDF.

Lot of trouble.

But if you absolutely absolutely absolutely need to lock things down in such a way, you can do it.

If I were to create a questionnaire here, a a oops. N a q q e b d c.

So I have a questionnaire, and then I've got a form up above here, Blah blah blah. Field AA.

And the blah blah. Field BB. I'll just do that much as an example.

BB.

This might be a long complex form. Maybe it's, you know, fifty pages long.

And I don't like distributing this to my end users and having them see all of this fifty pages worth of all of this intense coding.

And maybe they don't know about the start button. Maybe they don't know that the oh, I don't have to wait this version of us.

Maybe they don't know about scrolling to the bottom before they see the questionnaire.

I really would like to give them just a, a less, threatening view here. What I can do is I can create the finished form.

And once I've got it all working properly, I can copy all of the form, the whole thing, and store it in a folio. This is a Docsera only feature.

Go into let me copy that. Copy.

Sources.

Folios.

I'm gonna create a new folio called, sample again. Let's try that.

Name the first passage. This is gonna be, form.

It's gonna be the whole form.

There's my folio named sample. It's got a single passage in it. I'm gonna edit the content of this passage, and I'm gonna paste right here the entire form.

Okay? It's got all kinds of fields and conditions in it, and then I save my changes to the folio. Save.

That folio is now saved out. And then in the form, I can delete all of the content of the form even if it's fifty pages long, and instead just put in a single fetcher code. Fetchers are the the codes that are used to fetch in information from folios.

I want to fetch in from my sample folio the passage name form, insert fetcher, and put it right here. So the entire body of my form is gonna be fetched into that location when the user clicks fill. Let's just see if that works. I'm crossing my fingers here because I did that kinda quickly.

So we've got a need an answer box here.

Next.

So the answer to one thing, two thing, three thing. And when I click fill, it fetched in the entire body of the form and then filled in, all the fields, did all the conditions and lists. You can have a very robust, you know, as complicated as you like form all contained within that single touch code so that when the form user opens up the form, they don't see all that stuff.

They will see the end results here. After they click fill, they'll see everything just like usual, but their initial view is not gonna be so so threatening to them. I did this just with a single passage that gets, fetched. You could easily set it up so that one of the questions here or maybe even a combination of questions in here would determine which passage was inserted.

So so one one of the initial questions would be what type of termination is this voluntary or un involuntary?

And then depending on the response, it might fetch in either one entire document or another entire document.

If you are bound and determined to actually lock things down, you kinda have to go with that elaborate PDF approach that I, was the last example I did previously, where you don't even let the end user generate the finished document. You just ask them for the answers to the questionnaire, send that to you, and then you generate the finished document based on their answers to the questionnaire. That's the only way you're gonna get an absolute lockdown.