Create Documents without Fillable PDF

Dan Cliff

It would be great to be able to author documents completely within the document builder without needing to create a fillable PDF first - this would make it a significantly better tool to use for creating project reports.

JL2022

I agree. It would be even better if we could generate a document from a row and the output be formatted as a form (especially if the data was entered via form).

Richard Heath

I support this @Dan Cliff .

I have spent an inordinate amount of time creating fillable PDF's. Some with in excess of 100 fields.

Trying to then line up the fixed text EXACTLY with the fillable field generated by Smartsheet is a tiresome process of trial and error. You think you have it nailed and after you test it, one field doesn't look right, so back to Acrobat you go, re-jig your PDF and then you start the mapping process all over again. Very laborious.

The Document Builder is an amazing tool, a real game-changer, but the component that is built outside of Smartsheet proves to make the overall process cumbersome.

Hageman

I created a fillable word document using Microsoft Word's developer tools. Even creating the fillable form in word, Adobe forces me to recreate the form fields. The amount of text in the fillable fields does not adjust the underlaying document. It would be nice to have options to eliminate the need to use Adobe at all, like having a document builder tool directly in smartsheet, but compatibility with word documents is ultimately preferred.

Dan Cliff

It does seem to me that the failing here is the reliance on Adobe as a product, not everyone has or wants to get Adobe Acrobat Pro for creating project reports or other documents from smartsheet.

At this stage I'm simply not going to use document builder as it's not a document builder - it's effectively an adobe mail merge tool. If building a full authoring tool isn't possible, the other option would be to allow for document templates to be managed wholey from MS Word and Google Docs so we can use our existing tools create the document template.

CBlass

The ability to be able to use or create a fillable word document vs. PDF would make this substantially more versatile. I have forms where the structure is there for guidance but the length of responses vary a lot and so there needs to be the ability to adjust the spacing etc. in word after. Being able to pre-populate with row data but generate in word for further editing would open up many options for using this.