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zcal: A Doodle Alternative

Introduction

With the number of online meetings increasing, communicating what times work for you are becoming an integral process of a smooth and productive meeting.

Unclear availabilities can pose as a serious setback in trying to set up a meeting, which creates more issues in the long run with time management and efficiency.

This creates a desire for online meeting scheduling tools so that everyone can meet and schedule a meeting at the optimal time. And it’s less of a hassle compared to long email chains.

One of the most well-known of these scheduling tools is Doodle. However, in my research there are a multitude of better alternatives and products. A clear contender for best doodle alternative is zcal.

Why not Doodle?

A key feature that determines the usability of a scheduling product would be ease of use.

Even though Doodle has a clear mobile app, the website is not the clearest. The user experience is not intuitive creating more space for potential miscommunication. This undermines the core reason of using a scheduling product in the first place—to decrease the chance of miscommunication for an easier scheduling process.

Furthermore, Doodle is a polling app which does not limit people to replying to a potential time with a yes or no, but also adding an additional “maybe” option where timing is not ideal but potentially possible.

Although this seems to be a great feature, this can create unclear availabilities due to cluttering.

Last, Doodle is free only for a limited number of features. Features such as seeing who has not answered the polling is only available if you pay for a subscription.

Why zcal?

On the other hand, zcal mitigates all of these issues while showing its superiority in design with a more user-friendly environment and additional features.

zcal’s website is intuitive and clear making it easier for users to understand how to schedule a meeting and show their availabilities to everyone. Furthermore, there is an option to see which times are the densest in terms of availabilities. This allows the users to have a quick and easy understanding of when a majority of people are available.

To make the process more streamlined there are two different invite types—a group invite and a 1-to-1 meeting. It gives you flexibility for a group of people to vote on an optimal time but it also minimizes the chance there is confusion.

In addition, all of zcal’s features are provided at no cost which can save a lot of added expenses while still being able to utilize all amazing features it provides.

Conclusion

All in all there are many resources and products out there to help facilitate scheduling needs. However, when choosing what to use it is important to consider if the product you use is actually beneficial to you or not in terms of you end goal—a productive meeting.

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Fillable PDF Form

Creating a Fillable PDF Form: A Guide to Your First One

Creating Fillable PDF Forms:  A Guide to Your First One

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Creating a pdf form to send to clients isn’t always an easy task. A fillable pdf form is even more complicated. Countless questions about how to actually fill out the form on the clients’ end, or even keeping track of all the responses on your end can prove to be a difficult task.

Using the right tools can help facilitate this process so that it’s easier to use and organize. There are plenty of tools on the internet, but today I will be going over zform. It’s a free and intuitive tool that not only makes it even easier to fill out forms in a questionnaire type manner for clients, but also helps you keep track of responses in one place.

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Tutorial

Step 1

Open zform and click create a new form.

You will be prompted to drop a file or click to choose one from your pdf files.

 

Step 2

There will be two icons at the top—Map PDF and Build PDF.

Map PDF shows you the actual pdf and gives you options to choose between 4 basic fields and 2 special fields.

Build PDF we will discuss later.

Step 3

You can drag these options over to your actual pdf to start creating a fillable form.

For example, once you drag the text input option to a part of your pdf, you will be shown the following information on the right (as seen by the picture below). There you can add a name to your input, group your input such as splitting by character (such as for phone numbers), finding duplicates in your form, and of the like.

The other options such as checkbox, signature, date, person name, and address all have similar information that you can put in.

Step 3.5

For the checkbox, there’s also an option to find related fields, where you can “Find related fields”.

This allows you to add more checkboxes and group them together. You can add more checkboxes to add to the pdf, see the options in the group at one place, and rename them as well.

Step 4

On the right toggle at the top, there is a build form option. This is the perspective that your clients will see. Essentially it is like building a questionnaire form for your clients.

On the right, you will see 5 options for mapped components and 4 options for unmapped components.

Step 5

On the right, the mapped components show the inputs fields that you have already dragged over on your map pdf side.

For example, I have 1 text input, 2 checkboxes, 1 date, and 1 signature. You can drag these over to the left in order to start creating a questionnaire.

You will see the questionnaire starting to form on the left and several options you can choose on the right.

You can rename the text input into an actual question or as a statement of what clients should write.

The required toggle gives you the option to make it optional or required. The placeholder allows clients to see an example in the light gray of the format they should use. The help text gives you the option to include additional information that clients can see if they are confused or need help.

There are 5 different options for validation.

In summary, these force the client to write a certain answer in order to submit the form. For example, by creating an email validation, the text that the client has entered needs to be an email in order to submit the form.

There are 4 different options for format.

In short, these give you the ability to make the text box appear in a certain way. For example, the calculation option allows you to use other text fields and add, subtract, and more to these fields.

Step 6

As for the unmapped components, they are parts of the questionnaire that clients can see but are not actually on the pdf form. The purpose of this would be to put information that would make the questionnaire form easier to understand for the clients.

For example, if part of a form had “if yes, then answer the following questions”, the multiple-choice allows you to add a part to your form where the client could choose yes or no, and the following questions would only appear if they clicked yes.

Similarly, the condition creates a condition where certain questions will only appear if they fulfill that condition.

The text input and paragraph option give you the ability to customize your questionnaire by adding instructions and of the like.

Step 7

You can share your form by clicking the three vertical dots on the top right. This gives you the option to fill out your own form (which you can also use to check what the client’s perspective is), share the form, view all the submissions in one place, and delete the form.

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Creating a fillable pdf form may seem like a daunting task at first, however with practice, it becomes much easier and the payback is enormous.

By spending that extra time, in the beginning, to create such a questionnaire from a pdf form, you can reap so many benefits such as organization and ease of use.