Webinar: How to Use Jotform Smart PDF Forms

hey everyone this is elliott with jotform here with chad from jotform as well and we're really excited you're able to join us today for our webinar on how to use jotform smart pdf forms this is i think one of the more sophisticated tools we've rolled out from a developmental standpoint and it's really pretty cool to see in action we'll get to do that today but before we do we'll start off with a bit of an overview and intro to the product which with no further ado we'll jump right into what we want to do today is give you a better understanding of the jotform smart pdf forms tool and how it works we'll look at what it can do and most importantly how you can make this tool work for you and really just reimagine the way you approach pdf forms we'll of course demonstrate it in use as well and then take some time at the end to answer any questions if you do have a question by the way you'll see a button on your screen that says q a so you can just click on that and type in whatever it is and then submit it to send a question our way at any time during the presentation so just what is jotform smart pdf forms well essentially it's a tool that takes your existing pdf files and transforms them in seconds to easy to fill online forms then once someone fills that form out it converts it back into the original pdf format now this is a really cool feature because it empowers you to send and fill potentially even longer more complex pdfs a lot more conveniently as an online form electronically even on your mobile device and yet it still maintains the integrity of the original formatting once it's all filled out and the best part is this doesn't require adobe acrobat pro or any fancy software the form will be right there online to fill out no matter what device you access it from and once again this product is 100 free to all tiers of jotform users but how does it work so you can upload any existing pdf you have on your device to jotform smart pdf forms where the tool will scan it and automatically generate an online fillable form from it it will retain all the content and text from the pdf and it senses what areas need to be filled out whether that's the name field signature date address what have you and then it creates the correlated data entry fields on the form itself you can then customize it just like your normal form builder making sure you have the exact fields you want for the fillable portions then once you're happy with the form you can assign it or share it via link and when the recipient fills it out it'll populate a copy of the original pdf with all their answers and this can be useful in a lot of ways it's really the kind of thing you might not even realize you need until you have it especially when it comes to longer more complex pdfs that can be a pain to fill out electronically or to scan through on your phone this turns them into a user-friendly online form for people to fill out wherever and whenever on whatever device and then it retains that original format as we've said which can be important for a lot of these types of documents and for record keeping just a few examples of where this tool might come in handy as you can see are legal documents contracts non-disclosure agreements application forms waivers request forms inspection forms the list goes on now a lot of these might be somewhat intricate or specifically formatted pre-existing documents that your organization relies on but you still need to get them filled out and do so electronically our goal with jotform smart pdf forms was to make that process a little easier for you so to get started it's really pretty easy and we'll demonstrate it in just a second but all you have to do is click on create form on the top left of your my forms page just like you're starting any other form then you choose import form and import pdf form right after that and you'll get to upload your pdf the tool will scan your file and create a form based off your pdf showing the original pdf on the right and the correlated form it just generated side by side on the left then you can check everything looks in order and make any adjustments to the online form you need to before sharing it always easier to visualize though so we'll go ahead and take you to a live demo so you can see this in action for that i'll pass it over to my colleague chad thanks elliot hey everyone chad here vp of marketing and communications at shot form i'm just going to take a few minutes to show you how to set up your brand new smart pdf form so first thing is first we need to actually begin the process with a pdf form so i'm going to exit out of the presentation for a moment and luckily enough we have this wonderful sports waiver and release of liability form it's nothing fancy probably looks like a type of pdf form that you've filled out dozens of times in your life and now we're going to demo to turn this form into a smart pdf form in jotform so we're going to start in the my forms page i'm going to go ahead and create a new form import form and now you see here the option to import pdf form this is where we'll upload the same liability release form this process might take a couple of moments while it converts there we go so the form you see on the right is the same pdf form that we started with and what you see on the left is a completely transformed version into an online form so just to quickly go through this when you click on any of these fields you can see where they're matched from the original document this is great if you needed to double check anything you could also modify these fields if you needed to make the fields any larger or place it any differently on the on the pdf form when it when it originally or when it publishes the submitted information and just like you're used to seeing you can add elements to this uh online form so if we wanted to add a text field or something like that um it gives you that option and then you can see where it would it would populate on the submitted pdf in this case it's a pretty crowded pdf it doesn't make much sense to add any additional fields we'll go ahead and remove that and we also have the option to customize the look and feel of this form using our form designer some of these preset color options are great we'll go ahead and make ours a nice purple and now let's go ahead and preview what this form will look like preview option right here in the top right so one of the questions you might be asking is what's the benefit of using an online form as opposed to a pdf and one of the main answers to that is ease of use especially ease of use for the form user or the person who's actually responding to the form and that's especially important when you factor in device types so pdf forms aren't really intended for anything other than being filled out on a desktop but that's not true with online forms which are responsive and can be filled out on any type of device so from the preview mode you can see how your newly designed form will look when it appears on various device types by default it shows you what it looks like on a desktop but you also have the option to see how it's going to look on a tablet as well as a smartphone as you can tell already this is a lot more friendly and approachable than uh than a pdf form this would be really easy for someone to fill out on their phone you can also change the orientation if you want to look at it this way as well but i'm not actually going to fill out this form for that i'm going to pass it back over to elliot being the amateur athlete that he is and he'll take a stab at filling out this athletic liability and release form now to get it into eliot's hands we're gonna we're going to assign it to him which we'll be able to do from the publish option and we'll go ahead and assign it to elliott by mailing it to him directly so now that the form is in elliot's hands we'll check back in a moment and see how the form looks when it's been submitted and it's back in my jotform account but in the meantime elliott will walk you through how this uh how it actually looks to fill out the form so elliot go ahead and take it away great thank you chad so he assigned the form to me and this is what it looks like i just get an email with a link to view the form directly which i'll click on here i can start filling and as you can see it just looks like any regular online form i can start filling out the fields sign date i'm gonna forge a fake parent signature right now kids don't do this at home and then i can preview what the final pdf will look like in its original format here we go um yeah everything looks in order just use that and i can just press submit and this will send the completed form back to him where it will populate uh on the original pdf format as we've shown so while i have you i'm going to go ahead and show another type of form a more complex form a job application actually and this will have a lot more fields a lot more processing that will need to take place but you can see that the tool will regardless take it and be able to transpose all the data really seamlessly so give it a second like i said some more fields it's a bit more of a complex document so it has to generate the online form from it here we are so on the right you see the original pdf application for employment and on the left you see the online form um so here all the fields that are correlated and everything looks like it transposed uh pretty accurately here we get to tinker or change or adjust anything that we want to in the form itself as an example available start date we don't need to the hours and minutes we're finding just the date so um we can take out that so you can just go into the form builder click into the field itself and then turn off the time field easy as that um otherwise it looks pretty good here uh anything else i guess we can just do the same thing down here again um adjust the properties turn off the time fields and uh yeah i think that uh that looks pretty good so we're gonna rename this quickly um just to job application perfect and then we're going to publish so we can assign the form i'll assign this back to chad just to show you and send away so he's going to get that invitation to fill out the job application and he'll also have my completed form for the athletic waiver that he'll get to show you on his end and with that i'll actually pass it back over to him so chad take it away thank you elliot and hello again everyone all right so let's take a quick look to see how elliott's submitted form shows up in my inbox so the pdf was sent to my email address and from here we can see how the pdf will look with look like with all of elliot's answers so all the answers you just saw elliott enter into his online format are formatted back into the original pdf we even have the option to have a time stamp on the signature field so we know the exact moment that uh mama smith and john smith signed their form all right so let's now let's check in on the form that elliot assigned to me we'll look at my inbox for this as well we'll go ahead and view the form [Music] and there we have it a clean easy to fill online form so this is kind of a longer form so i'm going to cheat a little bit to show you how it looks and fill it in automatically i'll go ahead and add my real name though i think there was a signature field at the bottom here as well i'll sign my real name and just to see how this looks as a pdf form we'll go ahead and preview it and there we go signature field at the bottom as well all right so i'm going to kick it back to elliott and we'll start our q a awesome thanks for that chad so yeah that concludes the live demo portion of this webinar thank you so much for watching and now we're happy to kick off q a to address any questions that may have come up during the presentation a reminder that if you do have a question now is your chance to submit it in the q a chat box so please feel free you

Channel: Jotform

Views: 15,586

Keywords: convert PDF, pdf converter, best form builder, contact form, easy form builder, form builder, jot form, jotform, edit pdf, portable document format, pdf design, e signature, electronic signature pdf, contract, application form, model release form, medical authorization form, responsive pdf, responsive design, pdf form, mobile friendly, conditional logic, email notifications, autoresponders, app integrations, automation, PDF, data collection, online form builder, webinar

Id: O28IsY4vPn8

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020