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U.S. Office of Personnel Management
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The Office of Personnel Management provides some electronic forms on its web site in both WordPerfect and Microsoft Word formats. Neither of these programs is an ideal medium for working with electronic forms, but both are used extensively. Therefore, we are posting some forms in these formats when they are provided to us by other agencies. We are not devoting our own resources to providing them -- our formats of choice are FormFlow and Adobe Acrobat.
Many people encounter problems when trying to use electronic forms produced by other offices in either WordPerfect or Microsoft Word. These problems are often related to font substitutions. If your computer system does not include the font which was used to produce the form it will substitute a similar font that you do have on our system. With the very close tolerances involved in electronic forms, this can cause problems such as words disappearing or the page becoming longer than it should be and wrapping over to another page. If the form is important and you expect to use it frequently, you may find it worth while to open it and make the modifications necessary to get it to work for you.
WordPerfect does not incorporate any special forms features. Therefore it lacks the ability to click on a box created by a WordPerfect special character for a check mark to appear. You must either check the boxes manually after you complete and print the form, or go to the (considerable) trouble of replacing the box symbol with a checked box symbol.
Microsoft Word does incorporate forms features, and thus is the more satisfactory of the two programs for this purpose. For example, you can click on check boxes in a Microsoft Word form and a check box will appear.