Hello Fountain of Knowledge.

I have an ‘idea’. I would like to create an electronic form for use ‘in the field’ that will populate an industry standardised form: i.e. it has a certain appearance. I would then like that form in the standardised format to be e-mailable to clients as a pdf and also as excel. I have a copy of the industry standardised form in excel. There are quite a lot of fields and entries.

So stage 1 would be to create simple something that can just populate my excel form but be a more enjoyable exercise than populating the form using excel/ google sheets etc on an android tablet or even smartphone.

Stage 2 in my quest for world domination would actually be to turn this into an app that I could even then sell.

Any ideas of services that could develop this for/ with me? I’ve seen online data entry websites which depend on a subscription and it’s cloud based: but ideally I need something that can be populated without a connnection to the internet.

Oh God!!! Input forms in Excel – the bane of my life 👿 👿

Are you an NHS manager?

Edit: Don’t forget to use loads of unnecessary colour & formatting in an attempt to make everything stand out, but in reality just make it painful to look at – really thick borders are great for this.

Oh, and plenty of merged cells

*Wailing smiley required*

I used to work with a company that distributed software that presented a nice input form then created a document from it using merge tags. Was about 10 years ago so no idea what it’s like now, but it was called HotDocs. A single licence wouldn’t have been too expensive

https://www.hotdocs.com/

Adobe and IBM are the big players already doing this. It’s difficult and expensive to create software that replicates paper forms. But Acrobat has tools to automate the creation of the end forms from scans.

https://acrobat.adobe.com/uk/en/acrobat/how-to/create-fillable-pdf-forms-creator.html

http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ibmformfami

hmm pdf forms are better than filling out a form in word granted….but ideally I would like something a bit more ‘easier’ as the fields that need filling in are all over the place in the industry standard lay-out. I have Adobe so have already created a form from my excel file.

Anyone have any opinion of Canvas?

I thought this place was fill of IT hipsters and geeks…

It’s Christmas Eve (sort of…), did you really expect that much today!?!?
🙂