How to Create & Fill Forms in PDFs

Are you tired of paper form fillings and scanning over and over? No worries, as UPDF is here to revolutionize the process for you with its ultimate form creation, editing, and filling features. With it, you can effortlessly create forms with multiple checkboxes, text fields, buttons, dropdown lists, and more. Besides this, you can also create multiple copies of the form, adjust its alignment, clear, import, or export data, and more.

In short, it's your best buddy when dealing with digital forms! This guide provides detailed step-by-step instructions on using UPDF to create, edit, and fill out forms in PDFs.

Create Forms in PDF Document

Here is your ultimate two-step form creation guide!

Step 1: Manually Create a Fillable Form with the Given Option

To create a form in a PDF document using UPDF, you will have to follow the steps below:

Open the PDF in which you want to create fillable forms. Alternatively, you can create a blank PDF file by going to File > Create > Blank Page.
Once your PDF has opened, enter the Edit Form mode by clicking the relevant icon on the left menu bar.

Now, choose and insert a checkbox that you want from the six given options on the top center. These options include:

Text Field – This is a simple textbox that you can add anywhere on the PDF file where the form fillers will need to insert certain information. Just click on the icon, and use the cursor to expand or reduce the box size until you acquire the desired size. You can also move it anywhere using your mouse.
Check Box – Want to add checkboxes to your forms, like those added at the end, to ensure that the form filler has attached all the necessary documents? Just click on the Check Box icon and drag the box to where you want to place it.
Radio Button – Besides checkboxes, you can also add radio buttons. The filling person just has to click on it to fill up the circle, ensuring the requirement has been fulfilled.
Dropdown – This option will add a dropdown menu to your form. You can later edit it to add multiple options for selection and a suitable header for the dropdown list. Form filling person can select a single option at a time.
List Box – If your form requires selecting multiple things and you want it to be in dropdown format, go with List Box. This option allows users to select one option from the list when filling out the form.
A button – Want to include buttons like OK to your form? You need to select this option. Clicking this button will hide some options, direct you to a specified URL, reset the form, or more.

Following are three video guides on how to add an action button, how to add a text field, and how to add a checkbox/radio button to a PDF form:

Step 2: Customize Your Form

The latest update of UPDF has added the following innovative features to streamline the PDF customization process.

Duplicate Across Pages – Owing to this option, you can duplicate a single action on all or your desired pages. Select the checkbox, text field, etc., that you want to duplicate to other pages, click on this option, and select your desired page range from the side menu. Lastly, hit Save to save your changes.
Create Multiple Copies – With this feature, you can create multiple copies of dropdown lists, etc. It enables adjusting the size of the copied items in different units, options for whether you want to copy fields across or fields down, and more.
Form Effects – You can also perform different alignment-related operations via this option. It enables aligning left, right, top, bottom, horizontally, and vertically, or distributing horizontally or vertically.
Field Recognition & Highlight Excising Fields – The first option from the right side on the top menu enables you to highlight already existing fields for convenient form filling and editing. Besides this, it also allows form field recognition, clearing forms, importing, and exporting data.

Edit Forms with Innovative Features

After successfully inserting a form field into the PDF, you can double-click on it to open the properties panel, through which you can customize the General, Style, and Action properties:

General: This includes the field name, tooltip, visibility, button style, default value, and more. Please note that the available settings here will vary depending on the field type you created.
Style: This encompasses the fill and text color, font, font size, text alignment, field size, and more.
Action: You have the option to add an interaction for the form field. For example, you can add a link to it so that when the user clicks on it, they'll be redirected to a web page. Similar to the General settings, the available actions will vary depending on the field type you created.

Fill Forms in PDF Document

Whether you want to fill and check the form you have created recently to ensure that every option works fine or just want to fill out another PDF-based form, you will need to rely on the following steps:

Switch to Prepare Mode and then enable the Form Field Recognition button.

All the fillable forms fields will appear as highlighted areas, depicting the colors you selected in the Style section.
Switch to Prepare Mode and then enable the Form Field Recognition button.

Just click once on any of the highlighted boxes, and if it's a text field, begin typing content using your keyboard. The checkboxes and radio buttons will fill up on clicking, and dropdown and list boxes will reveal options for selection. In the case of buttons, clicking on them will perform the associated action.

Once done with filling the form, navigate to the File tab and select the Save option to save the PDF form as it is or Save As to save the filled form as a new file.