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I've been leading my department towards going paperless for a little over a year now and we have figured out some great ways to save space and money while not using dead trees.

Everything is going swimmingly, except for one thing. Digital forms, E-forms, whatever you want to call them. My particular job (IT Auditor) requires a lot of forms to be filled in and we have a bunch of them made by someone else in Infopath, who converted our old paper forms for us. For reasons that would require a chapter here, Infopath is not the right solution for us. I've tried Word forms and they just don't look as professional as Infopath did.

So I'm looking for another solution where we can create a digital form that looks professional with minimal effort and can save the information within the form.

PDF would be the ideal solution, but I have not found a way to save the information within the form properly. I've looked at a couple of solutions, such as those presented here, but I just think someone must have thought of a more professional way to achieve this in the current age of paperless offices. Help me out Super Users! I'm willing to pay for the right software, so I want the best solution, not necessarily FOSS.

Edit: I have used Word and want a solution other than MS Office. I cannot store forms online, otherwise I'd just create a HTML form on our website and submit the information to a MySQL database, which would be the ideal solution. I am specifically looking for software that allows form creation and can save the form with the information filled out on it. I have found something that might work and answered below.

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5 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Microsoft Word has had this functionality for a long time. :)

Some examples/how-to's:

OpenOffice will also let you create fillable forms, and additionally save them to PDF:

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I mentioned that I had tried word forms, so I'm looking for something other than MS Office, preferably that saves PDF with the information filled out. – Paul Sep 7 '11 at 14:21
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up vote 1 down vote accepted

I have looked at PhantomPDF by Foxit, which at first glance seems to do what I am wanting to do: Create a (PDF) form, fill it out and save the form with the information intact.

Alternative software seems to require Adobe LiveCycle Forms Designer to run

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up vote 0 down vote

Have you tried Google Docs

Check out this Video - An introduction to forms

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I do not want to use Google Documents as there will be confidential information on these forms and Federal Law and Regulations prohibit us from storing information outside of our office. – Paul Sep 7 '11 at 14:22
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I'm not sure if this is legal... but you could download the results, then delete them from google servers. You should however realize (I'm not sure if its applicable) that hundreds of government agencies use Google apps for business... You also my be intrested to know that Google forces the use of SSO, forced SSL, custom password strength requirements... but if they can't be online... – wizlog Sep 7 '11 at 16:45
+1 for a good workaround. We are a government agency, but unfortunately the CFR that regulates us was written in the 90s, so all modern solutions such as yours aren't defined. This leaves you looking at the part of the regulation it most resembles, meaning the regulation is open to quite some interpretation. Most certainly in my agency the general consensus therefore is to avoid these modern solutions to avoid being the next statistic on the news if our data was to make it into the wild! CYA! :) – Paul Sep 7 '11 at 18:53
Please... not just yet... I'll find you a solution! – wizlog Sep 7 '11 at 19:45
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up vote 0 down vote

Any special reason you don't want to just buy Acrobat and use its excellent form functionality?

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Well we did download the trial and convert our word forms to PDF forms. However, we must have overlooked the part that allows you to save the filled out form, as when we tried it wouldn't allow it. Can you point me to where it does do that? We would certainly purchase it in that case unless we found a better alternative. – Paul Sep 7 '11 at 19:16
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Keep in mind I have Acrobat CS4, so if you have another version this may be inaccurate. To allow users of Adobe Reader to save changes, click Advanced >> Extend Features in Adobe Reader. – CarlF Sep 7 '11 at 19:45
OK I will try this again tomorrow--I had not heard of that Adobe Reader setting being the root cause. – Paul Sep 7 '11 at 23:35
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up vote 0 down vote

I've been a LaTeX user for years, so this answer might be biased, but there are ways to make input boxes inside documents with LaTeX.

This particular feature was even discussed on Stackoverflow. It is part of the hyperref package.

The best documents I've ever seen were typeset with LaTeX, so even if it takes quite some work to get things done in the first place, the result is excellent.

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