When you create a new template or document using lots of content controls all of the mouse work involved in setting properties and custom placeholder text can become quite laborious. See: Installing Macros for instructions on how to set up and use the macros provided in this Microsoft Word Help & Microsoft Word Tips page. Note: For an interesting summary of content control placeholder text oddities, see: 5 Curiosities about Placeholders in Word Content Controls (for developers). If you are familiar with the Word object module you may notice from the code above that the ContentControl object has a property '.PlaceholderText.' and that property itself is an object and not a string!! & 'Click the ''empty'' or ''title'' tag of the' _ MsgBox 'You must select a single ContentControl.' & vbCr + vbCr _ SetPlaceHolderText, , InputBox('Type your new placeholder text below.', _ There is no method in the properties dialog to modify the placeholder text. The following illustrations show the default placeholder text for a plain text (left) and dropdown content control (right) and the corresponding properties dialog. For reasons unknown to me, Microsoft left out the option in this dialog to modify the placeholder text. With the 'Properties' command in the Controls group you can set the properties for the various control types. Like the picture content control, the checkbox does not use placeholder text. Note: Word 2010 added an eight 'Checkbox' content control. Six of the seven control types includes a default placeholder text (the Picture content control does not use placeholder text).

Using the 'Controls' group on the Developer tab you can insert one of seven different content controls in your Word document. If you haven't used these yet then be sure to enable the Developer tab of your Word 2007 application and check them out. I think that content controls are, without a doubt, the best enhancement in Word 2007. The purpose of this Microsoft Word Tips & Microsoft Word Help page will show you how you can quickly modify content control properties including the placeholder text.

Insert placeholder microsoft word