How do I electronicify my Dad's paperwork?

July 22, 2009 4:04 AM

Help us get things electronic. My Dad has lot of forms (an example of one here) to fill out for his little electrician business. Lots of forms for each job. How can he fill them out on the computer, save it to a database and be able to print them out?

Ideally the computer version would look the same and he would be able to tab through the fields.

Any suggestions how we could do this?

Many thanks in advance

Chris

posted by mooreeasyvibe to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Best answer: I think Adobe Acrobat (pro version, not the reader) is still the best application out there for this. If the docs are already available in electronic form, all the better, they can be converted to a form and if you don't like the default automated tab setup, you can set the tab order in menu Tools --> Forms --> Fields --> Set Tab Order.

Yes, the current full Pro version is expensive, but you can probably purchase an older version MUCH cheaper and get the same results. I still use version 5 on 2 machines for creating forms and the Reader (free) on all of my other machines at home and version 9 at work.
posted by emjay at 4:17 AM on July 22, 2009

Best answer: Adobe Acrobat (full version, not reader) will let you turn the images into fill-out-able PDFs. (I know there is a word for fill-out-able but haven't had my coffee yet.)
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 4:18 AM on July 22, 2009

Dammit.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 4:18 AM on July 22, 2009

There are plenty (well, at least one) open-source packages (iText is one) that can produce PDFs with form controls that presumably you could feed/have fed by a database. But then you'd have to set up a web server, learn Java, learn JSP, make the forms, hook up the forms, etc.

Or you could use Acrobat.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:43 AM on July 22, 2009

Response by poster: Going through Acrobat now. The auto detection of fields did a pretty good job.

Many thanks for your help with this.

Chris
posted by mooreeasyvibe at 5:09 AM on July 22, 2009

You could use something like Bento (heard excellent things) or FileMaker Pro (I'm meh about this myself) to create forms that he can fill out and later manipulate in various ways. If you've just got a PDF that you can fill out, you can't do things like "average all sales for the past quarter" or "how many of X part do I order per year, is it worth making a bulk order now, will I really save money?" etc.

Personally, I'd roll a web app and password protect it so I could access it from anywhere (or just self host), but this isn't for everyone.
posted by Brian Puccio at 6:08 AM on July 22, 2009

If you wanted to go the database route, FileMaker Pro would be worth looking into. It's got good reporting tools that would let you drag database fields onto a scan of a given form.

(Fair warning: many people who do software/database dev for a living will snark about FileMaker, but it's a great tool for small shops doing exactly this sort of thing.)
posted by usonian at 6:14 AM on July 22, 2009

Word is capable of doing simple forms that can have the data exported for use in a spreadsheet or database. You are limited to fill in the blanks, check boxes, and drop down lists though.
posted by midwestguy at 7:15 AM on July 22, 2009

I'm confused, how does Acrobat save to a database? My first recomendation would be to build a web page for each document and save it to a database, but that requires programming skills. So my next recommendation would be to use build Microsoft Access Forms. You may already have MS Office, and all you need is to follow some tutorials - little or no programming needed.
posted by exhilaration at 12:41 PM on July 22, 2009

With a PDF solution, like Acrobat (although there are others that are cheaper, like CutePDF or PDFfiller), I think that it acts like a template. You open the doc, fill it out, then save it with the data entered. I'm not sure if you can connect the PDFs to feed into a database.

You can do simple math.

Or, you can look at the Nuance OmniForm program. Many years ago I set someone up with that and it worked really well. Unlike PDF though, it's a proprietary data format. I think they still sell the program and I think the Pro version costs equivalent to Acrobat.
posted by reddot at 7:04 PM on August 5, 2009