How to fit write-in text boxes within a line of text?

Hi everyone, this may be a silly/ignorant question, but I’m designing a survey that needs to have different options for answering it and this is really frustrating me!

Basically as well as an online form (the easy bit), I want the survey to be available as a document that people can either type their answers into and email it back, or print and post back. The problem I have is with questions of a format like:

How many people live in your household? [box for number]

or

Which of these options do you think should be the highest priority?

  • Option 1
  • Option 2
  • Option 3
  • Other option not listed (please write in) [box to write in]

For these types of questions I want to have the box sit within the line of text, and to be possible to just click in the box to type in it (without the first thing that happens when you click being options to move/resize/etc the box). This needs to be accessible to people who don’t have high levels of computer literacy so just being able to click in it and type without anything unexpected happening is important!

The trouble is, it seems impossible to do this with either frames, text boxes or tables - no matter how I anchor a frame or text box, it changes the flow of the text around it and/or clicking on it gets you move/resize/etc options rather than just typing in it. A table with just one row and column works for a box that is on its own line (and allows clicking in it and typing straight away), but it seems impossible to have it on the same line as other text. Is there any other way for Libre Office Writer to do this?

Use Form Controls.

I hope, this can help you:

Create a fillable form in Writer

Thanks, but that still doesn’t seem to offer any option for putting a box/frame in the same line as non-frame text, except for putting the whole line into a table.

Is it possible to make the borders visible for some cells in a table but not others? That could potentially give the appearance that I want.

Is it possible to make the borders visible for some cells in a table but not others?

Of course, use Menü Table>Table Properties and then tab “Border”.

You can set character borders to a space and tab text. So that people can just click and write.

See sample file.

Tested with LibreOffice 6.4.7.2 (x86); OS: Windows 6.1.


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