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.