Software for laying out a printed form -- boxes & text?

I work at a hospital with a gazillion different paper forms that go into patients’ charts. My task is to re-do one of these forms on behalf of the users. This particular form is unusually complex and dense with detail, all in the space of a single page. Thus it requires precise sizing and alignment of elements.

All the design elements, however, boil down to rectangular boxes of various sizes & aspect ratios & grid-lines of various weights, plus small text labels with adjacent check-boxes or fill-in blanks. There are no diagonal or curved elements, no images.

I’ve seen this accomplished with MS Office Excel spreadsheets, setting a fine grid & then merging cells as needed. But that seems overly complicated & doesn’t seem to handle very small fonts like 6 – or 7-point Arial. I also tried MS Word using text-boxes but found it very awkward. Or is it just me?

In years past I actually used scissors and glue, but that’s so 20th Century! The beauty of software is nudging everything into alignment.

A few years ago I used Adobe Printshop for a similar job, which was satisfactory, but I no longer have that software. Stuck with some old .p65 files. Last month I downloaded a free trial of Adobe Illustrator but found it hard to use / learn as well—30 days came & went without much progress.

So before coughing up $600 on Illustrator & sucking up a lot of tutorial time & spinning of wheels, am I ignorant of some really great layout software that produces only lines, grids, and boxes of different weights—but with very precise spacing and alignment—plus simple horizontal text labels, one or more per box?

My end result will be a printed mock-up that goes to a professional print shop, so no particular computer format is actually required. The print shop people want ink (or toner) on paper. Assume WYSIWYG.

I beseech thee, Flutherites and Oracles of Jellies: Is there simple software for a seemingly simple job?