Designing a Job Work Order Form in Microsoft Word

Job work order forms are a written contract between you and a client for services or materials. The most common elements found on a work order include customer’s billing and shipping address, customer’s name, ordered by, order taken by, description of work, materials, and an authorized signature. The order form may also include employee time spent on the job.

What goes on your work order depends on your industry and how you run your business. The best part of designing your own form is that you have complete control over layout and design. You can leave out the parts you don’t need in favor of expanding the areas that need the most space.

To help you get started, let’s take a look at creating a simple work order form using Microsoft Word. For this business, we will focus the most on creating a large area for materials and job description.

Step 1) Open Microsoft Word

The first thing I do is save my document. This way I can hit the save button as I work to make sure I do not lose my progress.

File-Save-Browse to a folder-name your form.

Step 2) Choose a page size

The standard form sizes include: full page, half a page or legal size. For the purpose of this tutorial I will be creating a full page form.

Layout — Size

Set the page size to 8.5×11.

Step 3) Margins

This may vary from printer to printer but our margins are typically .25”.

Using margins is important. If you create a form that goes beyond the desired margins, your printer will have to shrink your form down to size. If your form is too small or disproportionate, a printer may stretch your form to fit the margins. Preserve the look and size of your design by following your printer’s guidelines for page size and margins. Margins will help you utilize the space effectively because space is always something you need when you’re filling out a form!

A. Set your document margin

Layout — Margins — Custom Margins

Put “.25” in the top, bottom, left and right boxes in the margin tab.

Setting these margins will also help you when designing because you will be able to align objects to the page margins.

B. Creating a guide margin

Warning: Microsoft Word will allow you to place objects past the margin line (especially left and right). There is one way to avoid this:

If you would like to visibly see the margins of your work order, you can always create a box to leave in the background and delete it before print. 

• Insert shape

Insert —- Shapes — Rectangle

Click inside your document. The format tab should open. On the far right of the toolbar, there is a place to input your sizes. Put in 8w x 10.5h (this is subtracting the .25” from the edge).

• Change Color

On this same tab, to the left of the sizing, you will see “shape fill” and “outline”. Change the fill to white and the outline to red. That way you will know not to go beyond the red line.

Step 4) Company Information

A. Type in Company Information

Insert tab – Text Box

Choose the “simple text box” option and type out your company information in the box.

It isn’t much to look at yet but lets work on stylizing it.

B. Stylize the text

• Change the font

You can do this by highlighting the text and using the format box that pops up. Choose the font and size you would like.

Another optional method: highlight the text and right click – choose fonts.

I chose Arial Black – size 12 for the company name and Arial regular-size 10 for the company details.

• Center the text

Highlight the text and right click. Choose paragraph – alignment – centered.

Tip: If you have entered your website URL you can remove the hyperlink by highlighting the text, right click, and choose “remove hyperlink”.

C. Move your box

Take your cursor and hover over the outlined edge of the text box. When you see the move tool, click and drag the company information where you want to place it.

I moved it to the left corner.

You can use the resize tools to further adjust the text box.

D. Stylize the text box

I’m actually just going to remove the black outline around the company information. Do this by clicking on the box – Format tab – Shape Outline – no outline. Do the same for the fill.

Step 5) Name your form

If your business uses multiple forms, labels can be helpful for finding the correct form quickly. It also helps the customers know what kind of form they’re looking at or signing.

This is a work order form so I’m going to repeat the steps above to place a large WORK ORDER on the right.

Font style: text size 26 – Arial Black – Bold

Tip: You can also make a text box from the format tab by choosing the “draw text box” option and manually drawing a text box.

Step 6) Numbering

Adding a place for numbering is optional. You may choose not to number your work orders at all. If that’s the case, skip this step.

While still in the Work Order text box, hit enter, then tab, and type “No”. This is where the printer will place the consecutive numbering on your forms.

Font style: text size 18 – Arial Regular

Highlight just the “o” and right click – choose font.

Underline style: Words Only
Effects: Superscipt

Tip: If there is too much space between the “Work Order” and “No”, make sure the blank space in-between doesn’t have a large font size that is pushing the “No” further down the page.

Step 7) Creating 2 Columns

This work order has two columns. The first column holds the customer information and description of work performed. The second column has a list of materials, hours and customer signature.

A. Create the first column

Insert – Shape – Rectangle

Use the size controls to make the first column 3.9w x 9.36H.

B. Align your column

If you set your margin, you can go to:

Format tab – Align – choose Align to Margin.

This will line up our box with the margins we assigned to the document.

Click the “Align” button again and choose “Align Bottom” and “Align Left”.

If you didn’t set the margins, simply drag your box until it is lined up with the bottom left corner of the red box.

You should now have one large blue rectangle aligned to the bottom left of your document.

C. Stylize the Column

Select the column and go to:

Format – Shape Fill – None
Shape Outline – Black – Weight – 1pt

D. Create the second column

Select the first column and hit “ctrl + c” (command + c) to copy the rectangle. Once it is copied, hit “ctrl + v” (command + v) to paste a duplicate copy into your document.

Format tab – Align – choose Align to Margin.

Click the “Align” button again and choose “Align Bottom” and “Align Right”.

You should have two perfectly aligned columns.

Step 8) First Column Content

Again, this first column is going to hold the customer information as well as the description of work performed.

A) Add horizontal lines

For me, the easiest way to do this in word is to draw each line using line shapes and the gridlines view.

View tab – Click the Gridlines Check box.
Insert tab – Shapes – Lines

Draw a line two boxes down from the top of your column.

The format tab will come up where you can customize the look of the line.

Shape Color: black
Weight: ¾

Use the “quick insert shapes” panel to the left to insert more lines or use copy and paste. Once you copy and paste one line, you will only need to drag your copied line into place and hit the paste button again to create a new line.

On the 6th line, skip three boxes and add an extra line for style (see highlighted area in the above picture). This will separate the customer information from the description of work lines. You may need to turn off the “Gridlines” view for this step.

Keep going down the column until you reach the bottom. Your first column should now be filled with lines.

B. Job Location & Billing

I’m going to add a job location to the top of the first column. Now we know where the below described work performed took place. Next to that, I will add a Billing Address for invoicing purposes just in case we have a client with different location and billing.

• Add vertical lines

By adding some vertical lines, we’re going to clearly define our writing space.

Insert – Shapes – Lines

And draw anywhere inside column 1 and down 5 lines.

You can find the center of this box by using the align tools. Select your vertical line then while holding the shift key, select the outer box.

Go to Format tab – Align – Align selected objects.
Go back to the “Align” button and choose “center”.

• Place your text

Create a text box, remove the fill and outline, and type in “Job Location”.

Highlight the text – right click – font style: Arial – Bold – All Caps – Size 8.
Right click again on the highlighted text and choose paragraph. Choose Alignment – Center.

The text should be in the center-top of the text box.

To get it in the middle of the box, from the format tab choose Align Text – Middle.

• Do the same steps above to create the Billing Address.

Now that your columns are in place and there’s text going in, check on the placement of your Company Information. You can either keep it to the left corner or center it over the first column by using the resize handles.

C. Type of work being done

The box underneath the customer information is a place to mark what kind of work this is for.

The above was created by using Wingdings for the boxes.

Contract, Service & AMC font style: Arial regular – size 8 – all caps
Boxes use the letter “r” font style: Wingdings – size 10

D. Description of Work Done

You can name this section either description of work done or work performed, it’s up to you. The most important thing is giving your employees enough room to write. This includes making sure you have enough lines and that the lines are spaced wide enough to allow for legible penmanship.

Font style: Arial regular – size 6 – all caps

Center the text and push it as close to the double lines as you can so that you have plenty of room to still write on that line.

Step 9) Second Column Content

A. Add horizontal lines

Repeat the steps in 8.A to create the horizontal lines for the second column.

Leave space for Materials. I made the second row a little wider with two double lines to separate the materials row from the rest of the information.

At this time you could probably delete the red margin box we created in Step 3.

B. Order place by, taken by and date boxes

These boxes are going at the top of the second column.

Create 3 more text boxes like we’ve been doing and space them out along that top row.

Font style: Arial regular – size 4 – all caps

The size is your preference but make sure you’ll have enough room to write in the box and still see the text.

Tip: To align them, select all three and use your align tools.

Once your text is in, start placing your vertical lines to divide the row into three boxes. Give yourself as much room as you think you will need for each box.

C. Materials section

The good thing about this design is that it will have plenty of space to list parts and materials. The columns can be as wide as you need them to be.

Font Style: Arial bold – size 8 – all caps

If you get lost, follow the steps in 8.B – Place text.

D. Technician hours, payment, and authorized signature

Repeat the same steps we’ve gone over above to create the last part of the work order form.

Step 10) Print Ready File

Some printshops may accept word documents. If they don’t you will need to save as a PDF.

File – Save As – Choose PDF.

Step 11) Print your NCR Form!

Printit4less.com gives customers the option of uploading a form they already have designed and ready to go! You can also choose from one of our pre-made work order templates to get you started. All of our work order forms are completely customizable.

Categorised in: Business Forms 101, New products, Printer's Advice, Tutorials

This post was written by Progressive Printing Team

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