Perfect PDF Form Capture

PDF's won! The battle is over and they're the default digital document for our modern computing age - although ODF may try to disagree.* Of course, if you need to send someone a digital document, you obviously have a number of options.

You can point them to a web page - most people have access to a web browser. You can send them a Microsoft Word document and hope they have something to open it - Google Apps is free. You can always send plain text or an RTF document - they're pretty universal.

But, if you want pictures and graphs and a pretty layout to boot, then you're probably looking at PDFs as your format of choice.

Then there's real-world forms. You know, the analog to digital conversion we'll be making for years to come. The one where many organizations are mired down by forms and processes which still deal with physical paper.

While filling out a PDF form is often a simple matter of acquiring a free or inexpensive app, it's much nicer to just capture the data directly into your data warehouse right off the bat. Being able to also output the form is just what may be needed for that digital migration.

Fortunately, for us FileMaker users and developers, it's pretty darn easy to make the data capture process really easy for PDF forms. Being able to send them right back out is also a simple matter. This video walks through the process of taking a PDF form and integrating it into a FileMaker based workflow. How far you go with what is shown is only limited by your imagination!

*ODF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument)

Tags:
PDF

Comments

Hello Matt, this is good work and well done. You did not actually say that your application could work on WebDirect. Few people in general public have FileMaker; a little more can take the trouble of installing and learning how to use FileMaker Go to fill a form. Stil this is limited to a tablet. But the vast majority of people know upfront how to fill a form on a Web Page from their computer. How about this platform. Did you test your layouts with it? I think that popovers work well in Web Direct. I did not test navigation bars. But I also know that Web Direct can lack stability. When something goes wrong, you are taken back to the defautl page. Too bad that they did not make an equivalent of FileMaker Go for PC or Mac, just limited to data entry.

Thanks

Posted by: gillesp
Wed, 07/01/2015 - 8:47pm

Matt-
Great video as always. You mention "free filemaker go" at the 3:30 mark of the video. While Filemaker Go is "free" it really isn't in terms of deploying with anything over Filemaker 13, right? Connections need to be purchased, etc. for web based forms. This is something I really struggle with, when it comes to the Filemaker model, as I have users in different states, who connect remotely. Introducing Go to them means a pretty large expenditure in terms of concurrent connections. Are you doing something here with other witchcraft and sorcery?
Jesse

Jesse Roberts
Brand Builders
STiLETTO Software

Posted by: jrobgk1
Tue, 08/04/2015 - 9:42am

You can use Go without it ever connecting to FileMaker Server. The advantages of connecting to server are having centralized data, but it is possible to use Go without having a network connection, then transferring data in other ways. Using Insert from URL can do it and you can always email an export which can be easily imported via drag-n-drop.

It all depends on the workflow needed.

-- Matt Petrowsky - ISO FileMaker Magazine Editor

Posted by: Editor
Tue, 09/01/2015 - 6:39pm