Hello there,
Here: Civil Cover Sheet | United States Courts there is a pdf from which I want to practice on and retype it into Word file.
I did some progress and I attached a sample below.
Someone told me that to retype it, you need to make table covering the whole page, so I started, but it's really frustrating, especially not being able to resize a cell or a number of cells without affecting the entire row, which led me to surrender because soon or later I will find many mis-formatting. But I want to start again, Could you suggest what are best practices or methods to achieve such document in word?
Thank you.

Attached Files

Sample.docx (32.3 KB, 6 views)

So why not just open the PDF in Word, then save it as a Word document?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I am an attorney and routinely move court forms into Word. This one I would leave as pdf unless I had a very specific reason to convert it. If I did, I would first try the approach suggested by Paul, opening the pdf in Word and letting Word convert it.

That would result in a document that would be very difficult to edit.

The alternative approach is to copy everything from the form and paste, as plain text, into Word and then format it in Word using styles (and tables). This will result in a document that is easier to edit.

The court is not going to want you to edit this much anyway. It may prohibit it.


The only reason I can think of to bring this into Word would be if you have some sort of case management system that can fill it out. Looks like a LOT of work, to me.

I tried both opening in Word (365) and letting Word convert it, and opening in Adobe Acrobat (X standard, yeah I know, old) and using Save As/Word Document. The latter came out much more usable than the former, in terms of placement on the page.

Ann

Hello, there, I apologize for being late, I have lost my browser session (over 100/200 tab) due to crash and I had to restore the important tabs one by one from history (and still doing it).
Thank you for your contribution.

I have tried Word to convert it but it doesn't do much for this complex layout. (Plus this is not the purpose I want).

The issue is that customizing a table is very hard because the structure of table is connected together, so the approach was to draw columns and rows to fill the page, the table then will be something like a grid. And put the table inside a blank text box. (I tried to make a lot of rows and columns to form a grid at first, but the computer was lagging and I guess it won't work like this, so while I progress in the document, I drew columns and rows when needed)

This will gave me somehow a chance when resizing/dragging rows or columns, so when I drag a row in the right side of table to resize a cell, the left side could be not affected due to many rows found. This will give a chance to the left side to be independent from other rows to the right side.
But I couldn't make this approach perfect plus it's not effective in all cases since I'm depending on luck I guess in this case.

The second approach I tried, why not try to put the table inside a blank text box when needed? so I tried it and this gave me more control over the flow of content. If I'm in a situation where a conflict could happen, I make table inside text box to avoid it, like what I did in "Personal Injury" part.


I did practice and learned a lot, see the attached sample v2.
Thank you all for your efforts, Although the document is messy, but I think this could be improved.

Attached Files

Smaple-2.docx (76.1 KB, 8 views)