We use several Word documents as templates and currently include 'guidance' text for the reader - in the form of grey, italic text - to provide guidance to the person completing the document.

Note how the grey+italic text is used to provide both guidance and example content

Problems with this approach include:

• People forgetting to delete all of this template/boilerplate text
• People using the italic+grey formatting when inputting real information because they don't change the style

We've considered including Reviewing comments as an alternative but this can be a pain and suffers from the first problem above.

I'm not sure a simple, elegant solution exists here but if there's something obvious I'm missing I'd love to hear about it.