Help! I'm wasting half my day filling out the same forms over and over...

October 18, 2006 10:47 AM

I fill out a lot of the same postal form, just with small amounts of different information in it. This form needs to be printed out a couple dozen times a day. Is it possible to dreates a PDF in Acrobat or Indesign that has a user-fillable text box that will show up when printed? I'm currently just editing and printing a Word doc, which is less than ideal.
posted by clango to computers & internet (9 answers total)

Is your Word doc a regular doc, or a template? A template might fit your needs better.
posted by raedyn at 10:52 AM on October 18, 2006

(better than a regular Word doc, I mean)
posted by raedyn at 10:52 AM on October 18, 2006

It's a regular Word doc. I actually hate word and would prefer to use a lighter-weight program for this silly little task. I'm a lot more comfortable with real page layout stuff than I am a word processor.
posted by clango at 11:10 AM on October 18, 2006

Do you fill in lots of the same information, or is it always different information?

I would personally do this in Filemaker, since it's speedy and easy and has decent wysiwyg page layout features.

If you want to do it in Acrobat, you'll need the full version of the program (not just the reader). But it should be easy to set up.
posted by bcwinters at 11:14 AM on October 18, 2006

I've done this in Acrobat Pro with some USPS mailing forms. In the menu Tools>Advanced Editing>Text Field Tool, you can draw a box in the 'blank' of the form and when you save it, only need to use the ordinary acrobat selector (or the tab key) to cursor into the PDF and enter text. And just hit print from there.

If you're doing this dozens of times a day, you might want to set up a mail merge to create these copies for you.
posted by cowbellemoo at 11:46 AM on October 18, 2006

(I've done the above by making a high-res image of the PDF page, placing it in a Word file's header, and lining up merge fields over the image.)

If you've already got the data typed, it would be easier to bundle it into a spreadsheet and merge than to reenter the data into a PDF.
posted by cowbellemoo at 11:49 AM on October 18, 2006

Is there some reason that you can't do a mail merge?
posted by Saucy Intruder at 12:15 PM on October 18, 2006

Avery makes forms and software that automate the process. You can pull in addresses from your Outlook Contacts, put a form in the printer and have, for example, a Certified Mail (including Return Receipt) ready in a couple of minutes. If you often mail to the same address, you can save the filled-out template and print the next time in a few seconds.

Blumberg makes hundreds of forms with software to fill them in.
posted by KRS at 1:38 PM on October 18, 2006

Can't really do a mail merge because it's not "regular" data - lots of little cut/pastes and little edits.

Those Acrobat tips sound excellent. Exactly what I wasn't sure of. Thanks!
posted by clango at 2:21 PM on October 18, 2006