Creating attractive, accessible forms OR How to overthink a plate of beans.

May 20, 2011 7:42 AM

Making better forms. How do I do it? What do I use?

I've given myself the task of remaking all the forms for my program. Every person I serve gets a packet of about 8 forms, and I send as many as 10 packets a week. Then I work with those packets (adding more along the way) for about 2 years.

Anyway, the forms right now are awful. Hard to follow, etc. I'm working on making them more legible and easy to follow. Every person being served is a person with a disability.

So I've got a friend who is a graphic designer, and she overhauled one of them in a way that I think is great---she used LiveCycle, which I think I could figure out well enough, but here's the rub:

The forms are not blank. Right now, I use Word/Excel, and merge every time I make a form, the reasons being 1, to make sure I can read their names, 2 for speed as every form needs info on it (date mailed, etc.) and 3 so that people don't duplicate the forms and give them to other people.

It may be possible to duplicate in Word what she's shown me in LiveCycle, but I think it will be way more difficult. Also, and this is probably a shortcoming on my behalf, when I do the merges, because each field is a different length every time, I always end up w/ some funky formatting when word injects the data. This is likely because I'm not setting something right in Word.


TL;DR:
How can I make gorgeously pretty forms, that are merge-able? A different software? Am I overlooking something easy?

I can upload copies of the old versus the new (and neither is a final version, just concepts for dumb old me.)

posted by TomMelee to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Response by poster: It occurs to me that when I make editable pdf's, I can give two fields the same source and thus only have to type something once to make it appear in multiple places---perhaps this is the best idea? The data that typically gets merged into the form is First/Last Name, Address (street, city, zip), telephone number, referral agency (case manager, agency, telephone), and need.

Right now it's super handy to just fill in the spreadsheet, open the merge template, merge and print...but the product is fugly.
posted by TomMelee at 7:45 AM on May 20, 2011

It would be helpful to see the forms. With the caveat that everyone who answers is going to approach this problem with the toolset at their disposal, this is what I would do:

I wouldn't put this data online but you could setup a small local webserver and database, duplicate the forms with an HTML print style sheet and be able to add, edit and print pretty easily. "Merging" would become either opening a client record or adding a new client record.

If you can use your existing spreadsheet as the datasource, it sounds like duplicating the LiveCycle forms as PDFs might be less upfront overhead, though.
posted by DarlingBri at 7:58 AM on May 20, 2011

Response by poster: All right. I don't want to post the entire packet because it's got lots of identifying info on it, I like to maintain a fascade of anonymity. Here's the first page, which is by far the ugliest.
Sample 1, Word Format, Merge stripped
Same Form, Redone in LiveCycle

Can LiveCycle Merge? I didn't even think of that. I'm quite the adobe noob.

Actually, what the girl who did the second one said was that she used "Adobe Pro", I have no idea what this is and the closest I can figure is LiveCycle. She's had a series of family emergencies and can't deal with me right now, so I'm forging ahead blindly.

Also, everything is printed in black and white, so colors aren't important---contrast is.
posted by TomMelee at 8:05 AM on May 20, 2011

Best answer: I think this is the product she probably used. The standard application to make PDF's, including forms. Looks like there are plugins to do a mail-merge as well.
posted by dyno04 at 8:13 AM on May 20, 2011

Also if you look at this Adobe forum post (at the bottom) it gives a quick rundown of how to do a merge with Acrobat.
posted by dyno04 at 8:16 AM on May 20, 2011

Best answer: Although this book really deals with designing online forms, I think some of the insights about how to align and group elements logically and improve overall display will still apply to your quest. The book is really well written with lots of good real world examples, so even if you don't nerd out on this stuff (like I do), you may still find it a pretty fascinating and enlightening read: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/

Good luck!
posted by missmobtown at 9:20 AM on May 21, 2011

Response by poster: In case anyone cares, we're a non-profit without the budget item right now to buy the merge software, so I'm just recreating the general look and feel of the form in Word. It's going pretty well, so far.

Thanks for the heads up on the form website too, missmobtown.
posted by TomMelee at 5:16 PM on May 23, 2011