Why You Need to Upgrade Your Forms to Interactive PDF

If your business relies on any kind of form that employees, vendors, clients, or customers need to fill out, it might seem like a daunting task to take those non-interactive forms and make them interactive. But the truth is, it’s not.

With the PhantomPDF 6.0 release, users gained the ability to turn a non-interactive PDF form quickly and easily into an interactive form that anyone can download, fill out, print, or return to you by email. (Note: for more on interactive vs. non-interactive PDF forms, please see Filling Out Non-Interactive PDF Forms.)

What are Interactive PDF Forms?

An interactive form is a PDF file with fillable field(s), enabling the recipient to fill out or “interact” with the form by clicking the form fields and the need of using other pdf editor features.

Why Should you Use Them?

What benefits do interactive forms give you? The most obvious one is reducing the paper chase. Interactive forms let you get rid of time-consuming, error-prone paper document processing and storage. (Hello, paperless.)

Converting existing non-interactive to interactive forms also lets you repurpose other publicly available forms, such as those from professional organizations or the government.  This alone could top many HR, legal, and government managers’ lists when they daydream about increased efficiency.

What’s more, interactive forms mean you can capture data more easily. With Foxit PDF Editor Pro and a little bit of custom JavaScript (which is built-in), you can connect your interactive forms to your database and insert, update, or delete database information. That means fewer manual data entries, which reduces time, cost, and errors.

What’s more, because they’re PDF, your interactive forms will be viewable and usable by anyone that has a PDF reader, which most users do already.

Quickly and Easily Create

With the PhantomPDF 6.0 release, came new capabilities like form field recognition and editing, which enable you to create interactive PDF forms quickly and easily from your existing documents. 

The Form Field Recognition tool automatically identifies likely form fields in your PDF documents. Simply let it do all the heavy lifting, then touch up the resulting file to add, change, or remove any fields in your interactive forms.

Similarly, when you click on a form field, the Designer’s Assistant automatically fits the field into the likely space that it should occupy, giving you one-click form field creation. 

Talk about timesaving !

Other Important Features

While those two features alone may be all you need to turn a non-interactive form into an interactive one, you may want to get fancier by adding buttons, check boxes, signature fields or other features.

To learn how to do so, refer to the “Forms”, Chapter 9, of the PDF Editor User Manual or stay tuned for our upcoming blog articles on designing interactive PDF forms from scratch.

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