How To Create PDF Fill-In Forms

Since its arrival in the early 1990s, the Portable Document Format Standard, also known as PDF, has become an essential part of the information technology world. It is widely used today by lawyers, HR managers, publishers, and other professionals and is  the digital format of choice for any important document.

 

The aim of PDF standard is to make it easy for people to share their documents, irregardless of the operating systems and devices that they are using. Unlike Word Processing files, PDF documents cannot be changed and can be password protected to ensure that only authorized eyes read them. The ubiquity of free PDFD readers, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, means that everyone with a computer or mobile device has easy access to them.

 

Although there are advantages to PDF, there are also some limitations that are worth noting. Particularly, when the user needs to edit or make changes to the document they saved in PDF format. Editing can only be done in a crude fashion, meaning that you will have to scribble on a printed page with a red pen or use a highlighter. There are also custom software that can help you make changes to the document, but many of them come at a cost.

 

The best way to create and edit PDF documents is to type them out in Microsoft Word or Open Document Format. Once done, save it as .doc. Then, make a carbon copy of the file in PDF format and send that to your recipients.

 

If you would like the recipient to fill out the form in PDF, here are the steps to creating an Acrobat PDF Fill-In Form:

1. Install Adobe Acrobat from the Install Software page, and restart your computer.
2. Then, create the PDF document.
   1. Open the document in the word processing program (Word, Wordperfect, etc) it was created in.
   2. Choose Print from the File menu.
   3. In the Printer Name drop-down menu, choose Acrobat PDFwriter
   4. Choose the file name to save the document to (must end in .pdf)
   5. Close the word processor.
3. Go into Adobe Acrobat and open the pdf document you created.
   1. Click on the Forms tool in the left hand menu in Acrobat:
   2. Use the tool to draw a fill in field where you want the user to enter information; a field properties window will come up:
   3. Enter a unique name for the form field and choose a font and font size for the text. (If you want to make this a checkbox or other field type, you can pull down the field type from the menu in the top right.)
   4. For multiline text entry boxes, click on the Options tab and check the ‘Multi-line’ box:
   5. Click OK to have the field saved.
   6. Repeat for each fill-in section of the form.
   7. Save the file.

With the InfoFlo CRM Software’s Document Archiving feature, you can now instantly drag and drop any document, including PDF files, and link them to a contact, company, category or shared project entity. They will be automatically archived – making files quickly and easily retrievable for later use.