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Default Form Fields, Protect Form, Mail Merge, Templates vs Documents

Help for completely self-trained user:

I've just started a new job and I'm having difficulty with their documents
being inefficient, but I don't know enough yet about the tools to be able to
fix them. So, I have some simple questions, and I'd appreciate some feedback
on our current or my proposed procedures.

Right now our verifiers work from a protected form with form fields, but
occasionally they need to change some of the parts that are protected (adding
an additional category to a field), so the "protect" ends up being toggled on
and off several times. This might be fine.

What the verifiers currently do is to take the partial information that we
receive about the clients, type it out into one of the forms, cut and paste
it into two or more additional forms, save them each as unique documents,
then work from these documents while they are on the phone to the client.
What I'd like to do is fill in each of those forms simultaneously with the
supplied information before assigning them to the verifiers. I think I need
to use mail merge to do this, and I've figured out the basic steps on how to
do it. After the merge is complete, I'd like them to continue to fill out the
form while on the phone. I'm assuming it makes sense to have the merged
document come out with form fields still on it and the document still
protected so that the verifiers don't inadvertantly change the form. I've
already gotten some help about how to do this, but it won't make sense to me
until after I study it for a while.

Lastly, and, this seems like a stupid question to me, but I'm also unsure
about the difference between a template and a document, and whether there is
a difference about how they behave. Isn't a template just a partially
complete document?