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Updated 6 months ago

Existing PDF Form

Ideas
At a glance

The community member would like the ability to upload existing PDF forms and add interactive components over them for external users to fill out, as they often have issues with external users leaving out required sections. Another community member raises concerns about the user experience, as PDF documents do not scale well for mobile scenarios. The original community member suggests that converting all their current business documents to a new forms system would be time-consuming, and they would prefer to leverage their existing tools like Word and Excel by uploading templates and adding overlay components. The community members discuss the technical considerations, such as the limitations of PDF documents in supporting dynamic components and responsive layouts. Ultimately, the original community member believes the user experience with the proposed solution would be more straightforward than their current process of emailing forms and waiting for them to be returned with missing information.

TTom

I would like the ability to upload an existing PDF form and add interactive components over it for external users to fill out. I have many older business documents and spreadsheets that could be adapted this way. The biggest issue we face with external users filling out our business forms is that they often leave out required sections. This program would help address that problem by ensuring all necessary fields are completed.

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1 comment·3 replies
EErin Dwyer

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the suggestion! Im curious, what benefit do you see controls overlayed on a PDF would add over building the PDF document as a form. PDF documents do not scale well for mobile scenarios so overlaying components over a PDF document could create a poor user experience in some scenarios.

TTom

Hey Erin,

Converting all of our current business documents to the team's forms would be extremely time-consuming. Additionally, my staff are comfortable using Word and Excel, and teaching them to use a new forms system would take a lot of time. If they could create a template in Word or Excel, upload it, and then add overlay components, we could achieve exactly what we want while leveraging the features of both programs.

The biggest benefit of using Teamforms for us is the ability to easily send forms, such as a 'Client Register Form,' and integrate power automation into our process when the form is submitted. I understand the mobile scaling, would zooming not suffice?

EErin Dwyer

Thanks for the additional context!

I guess there may be some technical considerations with the PDF approach, some that come to mind are:

  • Team Forms supports data-grids which allows users to add a dynamic number of rows to a table, however PDF documents are static by nature so this would not be supported

  • Similarly edit grids and many layout components like columns would not work

  • Forms using PDF as an underlay would not be responsive to various screen sizes force users to zoom/scroll

TTom

All valid points Erin. The main components we would use are text, number, check boxes, and signature fields. The user experience with Teamforms is much more straightforward than our usual process of emailing forms and waiting to receive them back only to have missing information.