HH,

          I use Legacy form fields rather than Active X ones when designing forms.  That being said, if absolute immobility of items relative to one another matters, text boxes are a far easier way to get that result than form fields, though one can use those with some effort.  A check-writing template is probably best accomplished with text boxes if ease of creation is a major consideration.

          I recently had a client who was enrolled in a program that required her to fill out client information forms, all of which were MS-Word documents, but none of which utilized true form fields, and were thus completely inaccessible.  I whipped up the same forms using form fields with descriptive text and help text for each field (most of which she'd probably never need, but) so that she could either fill the form out herself or be able to easily zoom through one filled out by someone else to find exactly the piece of information she was looking for.

Brian, off to tutor yet again (and at least I'm a day ahead of the "Great Storm" - we're set for a possible 18-24 plus inches of the white stuff)