If you want Adobe forms, then you will need a PDF editor capable of creating them. Acrobat is the obvious solution.
With Word legacy forms you can choose the form field shading option. With recent versions of Word it helps enormously to use Greg Maxey's form field add-in to provide easy access to the form controls
http://gregmaxey.com/word_tip_pages/..._controls.html
With content controls, you can set the option to user a style to format text typed in the fields and you can use the highlight tool to highlight the field prompt text in design mode. This will show the fields highlighted, and when typed into they adopt the style named in properties.