Getting Started with PDF Forms
Plan Before You Begin

By Carl Young
PDF Conference

So you want to be a PDF form designer? Or maybe you’ve been told you are going to become a PDF form designer.

You probably never told mommy and daddy, “I want to design PDF forms when I grow up.” The odds are you never took a high school, college, or technical training program that made you a certified PDF form designer. Most likely the task of designing PDF forms came with a job, and in many cases you’ve never had a lick of training.

While this article isn’t a replacement for a training class, it should help you get started. My purpose is to save you from muttering “why didn’t I figure that out sooner” and slapping yourself on the forehead.

In my opinion, most PDF form projects fail not because users are unfamiliar with all the options and switches in your form design software. PDF form projects fail because they are not thought through. Although you may be longing to add calculating fields to your form, please be patient and stick with me through this introduction. If you are not careful, your detailed, precise form will never be used. GAP (GAP, or Goal Attitude and Plan) can help you prevent that.

Goal

Strangely enough, many students come into one of my classes without knowing what they are going to use PDF forms for. Big, big mistake. Forms are not just something people fill in, and PDF forms are not just neat technology. Forms are the front end of a business process, sometimes one that is critical to the success of your organization.

To that end, your form deployment should have a specific goal. What kind of goal? Well that depends, but common ones include:

• Faster processing of orders.
• Elimination of rekeying entries from paper-based forms.
• Fewer calls to customers because required information wasn’t supplied.
• Lower costs by eliminating paper forms.
• 24-hour customer service at a lower cost (Remember when you had to go to a post office or library to get a tax form? Now they are available anytime at www.irs.gov).

There are lots of good reasons to move to PDF forms. Just make sure you have a clear one in mind.

Attitude

Instead of looking at PDF forms as drudgery, take a broader view. You are really in the field of business (or government) process improvement. Done correctly, a PDF form deployment can generate higher customer satisfaction, no matter if those are internal or external customers. A project of this type can often turn into a very high profile job. Make the most of the opportunity.

Plan

You have to have some way to reach your goal. The plan is it. Elements of a good PDF form deployment plan are:

• Why PDF forms. Are you better off with html forms or PDF forms? PDF forms look like paper forms, making the transition to online forms easier. PDF forms also print very well.
• What information will the form gather? Get management sign-off on every field. There’s nothing worse than designing a form, and then having someone come in at the last minute and ask for more fields.
• How much flexibility do you have to rewrite or reformat questions? Can you take a series of related questions from a paper form and put them in a combo box?
• How will the information in the form be transmitted? Print and fill? Submit over the web? Connected to a database?
• What viewer will your end-user have? If you are dealing with members of the public, expect to support people using the free version 4 Reader. Managed desktops inside big organizations usually are standardized on a specific version of Reader or Acrobat. If that’s so in your case, develop for your internal standard.
• Remember, Reader users cannot save form data or reliably e-mail data unless you have purchased special saving and signing rights from Adobe.

In the next article, I’ll show you how to set up the software to begin creating forms.

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