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Fillable PDFs are a great way to collect information from your customers without the need for a third party. Fillable PDFs can be used as registration forms, order forms, surveys, and more.
Today I'm going to show you how you can quickly and easily create a fillable pdf form using a completely free online tool. This way you can create a fillable form for your business, like contracts, intake forms, worksheets, workbooks, and more!
Let's Get Started
First, let's head over to Canva.com. Canva is an awesome free graphic design tool, ideal even for people that aren't design savvy! You are perfectly fine using only the free version, but if you would like to try out the PRO features I do have a 30-day free trial link right here!
I won't take you through the whole design process, because that is a subject for a completely different article, so for now let's just say we created ( or purchased) this editable birth plan, and we want to make it fillable for our clients.
Once you are done adjusting and customizing your template in Canva, you want to download this complete design as a PDF file. To do so you click on the top right, click share, and then download. Choose the 'PDF Standard' file type and click download. When the file is on your disk we can now head to the PDF Escape (LINK).
Only a few more clicks...
PDF Escape is a free tool that allows you to fill out, modify or create PDF files. On the home page just click on 'Free Online' and then select to upload PDF. This will allow you to drag and drop your PDF file. Now we have the file in here, but obviously, the fields are not fillable yet. So on the left-hand side, you are going to see all of these elements that you can now insert into your PDF. I'm going to go into 'Form Fields', which is the form field creation tool.
Click on it and here a window will show up where you can select the field type you want to create. The first one I want to create is text, so if I select text and then I just drag the box into the place where I want to create a fillable text box. Once I have the field set up, I can go into the yellow field on the top left side and change the font, size, or color. And if you want to change anything else, you can just right-click on the box and go to object properties, and there you will see a few items you can change like the alignment, or if the field is required. You can also save time and just duplicate the text box, just right-click, choose duplicate, and then just line it up with the place. Then just continue to do more. You can of course delete anything, just right-click and select 'delete object'.
So I did all the text boxes and now I want to add checkboxes. So I just go again into 'form fields' and select the checkboxes. And now I can drag the check box into the field where I want to use it. Of course, you can also change the color of the check mark, just choose a different color in the top left yellow field. You can also choose if you want this check box to be square or round, or if the check mark should show up or not. All of that can be done as usual using the right click and selecting 'Object Properties'. Of course, you can duplicate the field and then just add more checkboxes to fill up the sheet. In the same way, you can also add text paragraphs, a dropdown menu, a list box, and more. You can use as many different types of fields in one document, as you want.
This is easy!
Once you are done editing, just go to the left side of the file and there you have a few options like, save, save and download, or print. choose the one that would work the best for you, I mostly choose the save and download, and your fillable PDF is ready! Now you can send it over to your clients, they can easily fill it out and return it to you. It saves you and your clients not only tons of time but also helps you save the environment by using less paper!
Watch it on YouTube
