ExcelBanter - Filling in a Gov't Form

Format | Sheet | Background
then choose the scanned picture of the form.

Good luck on setting up the cell alignment - it gets tricky. You'll
probably also want to set the sheet's PrintArea so that it prints a copy that
includes all of the form you've got set up as the background.

You'll notice that the background will be repeated many times on the sheet -
that is because it is a background. By controlling the PrintArea, you'll
control what actually gets printed.

For setting up the sheet so that you can fill in the appropriate areas
relatively easily, this is one time I recommend using the Merge Cells
function. Grab lots of columns and set their width to something narrow, like
3 or 4. Then use row height adjustments to get the bottom of the rows lined
up with the form properly. You can merge cells on a row to get the space you
need to type in responses. By having lots of columns to use for the merges,
you have more flexibility in getting them aligned. It'll probably take you a
couple of tries to get things lined up just the way you want. I suggest that
you start doing your alignments in a top-down, left to right fashion as it
will probably make aligning column edges with blank spot starts easier as you
work across the page.

"pdberger" wrote:

Good morning --

I'd like to use Excel to fill in a set of Federal forms. So that they don't
reject it, I'd like to scan it in, and then just orient the cells to fit and
print in the correct spots in the forms. I'd prefer not to do this in Word,
for a variety of reasons.

I've tried scanning in the document, pasting it, and then "send to back",
but it still covers up any text in the cells.

Can someone tell me if and how I can do this?

Thanks in advance.

Peter