In this video, I’ll show you how to make a fillable PDF form without Adobe Acrobat.
Creating a Fillable PDF form doesn’t need to cost you money.
You can convert a pdf to a fillable pdf form for free using LibreOffice Draw.
It is more of a manual process than an automated process like when using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.
If you’re on a budget this is a good alternative.
How to Convert a PDF to Fillable PDF Using LibreOffice Draw Transcript
In this video, I’m going to show you how to make a fillable PDF form without using Adobe Acrobat.
Hi, my name is David and if this is your first time watching my video tutorials, and you get any value from the content that you watch, kindly consider subscribing, liking the video, and share it with your friends.
It would really mean a lot to me if you also practiced what you see, so that in future, you can also teach others.
So what we have here, is a PDF form that is full of fields that don’t have any information that we can add. So we cannot edit the fields inside.
I can just open this up using something like Google Chrome
and just open it up. And you’ll notice that it’s just a membership form with some fields. So here’s the form.
The form is open.
And it’s a membership form where you can fill in your first name, last name, phone number, work, phone, email, etc.
So potentially, this is just a form.
What I want us to do in this video is to convert this PDF form into a fillable PDF form.
And for the purposes of this video, we’re going to be using an application we’ve used before, called LibreOffice Draw.
So I’ve already walked you through how we can use Adobe Acrobat DC to create fillable forms.
And it provides a good easy way to like just automatically recognize the fields that need to be entered.
But for this one, it’s going to be slightly manual.
So follow along, it’s pretty easy.
So the first thing we need to do is just open LibreOffice Draw.
Let’s come to All Programs> LibreOffice> LibreOffice Draw,
let’s click on that.
And once you click on that, it’s going to load up all the information that you require for this process.
So yeah, sometimes we may need all this information to like have somebody answer or fill out a questionnaire, a membership form, a booking form, or even a survey, and then send back the information as it is filled.
So it’s it’s it’s an easy way for us to do this.
So what happens here is that, we will first of all start off by opening our file to go to File, Open,
and then select the PDF form that you want to make editable.
So we just click on that, and click on open.
And once we click on the form, it’s going to populate right inside here.
So what happens is that when you look at the form, it’s not fillable, you cannot fill anything.
You can try and make some edits, maybe, let’s say to the to the to the to the text here, as I showed in a previous video of editing text in a PDF.
But for this one, all we need to do is to make these sections fillable.
So you see when I click on the line, you can move the line, change the color, and all that kind of stuff.
Now what I want us to do is to create this form to be fillable. So let’s come to the View button and navigate to the toolbars and then look for form controls.
Click on that.
Once you click on form controls, this particular panel is going to appear and has a bunch of selections that you can make.
And for the purposes of this video, I’ll need to magnify slightly so that we can all see clearly what we’re doing and what we’re working on.
So just zoom in a little bit, let’s say up to that section, that’s good.
And then just bring this up slightly there.
So what we need is to input a text box.
So for this particular line, we’ll put in a text box.
So we can just start off from here.
And if you wanted to add checkboxes, radio buttons, you can still create your own fields here are using these particular tools.
So but all we want to do for this particular video is to make these lines fillable so that people can fill up the membership form we have.
So just click on this.
And I’ll just say this, for free -it’s a repetitive task.
So what you do here is while with the plus sign, just come in, select where you want and just hold the left click and drag to the end where you want the fillable form to get.
And once you release, a box will be formed, it looks like this.
So this box is going to be a fillable field inside the PDF.
So if you just leave it at that, only these fields will be fillable. But we want to do that for everything else.
So you need to come back to the textbox- just highlight this section. And then let it snap- there we go. Click on the textbook tool again. Do the same for this.
Might need to move this up a little bit. Just move it there.
Click on the textbox again, just move this slightly- move it up. Fits.
Come to the email section, the textbox again, just fill this out.
So as you can notice it’s forming more or less like a table of sorts, you can scroll down so that we can fill out the other sections.
There we go.
And then the text box again.
There we go.
We can just adjust this, there we go. Just click on these to move this inside. There we go.
Here we go. And then we just come to this one,
I just keep going, just a few more fields to make fillable.
Let’s click on that. Drag and drop. Just drag- release, the textbox tool again.
There we go. Just pull this up, there we go. And finally, the section for the membership fee.
Just click on that.There we go.
So potentially, we’ve just filled out or created the fillable fields in our membership form. So pretty easy to do.
So what you need to do now that you’re done, adding all the fillable fields that you want.
Just come to File> Export as> Export as PDF.
Now, inside this particular page, the most important thing you need to ensure that you tick is this section, Create PDF form.
Now, click on that and creates a PDF form with fields that can be filled out.
So that’s the most important thing for the purposes of this video. And once you’re satisfied, you can just click on Export.
And once you click on export, it’s going to take you to the folder where you’d like to save the file.
If it’s not the folder that has appeared, select which folder you want to save it to.
So we can just come back. And let’s say- fillable PDF.
Let’s click on Save. And it’s going to save our form.
So if I minimize this and open our folder, and refresh, there is our fillable PDF form.
So what we can do, we can still open this up inside Google Chrome- open with Chrome. I’m trying to avoid opening it up with any PDF opening application.
Let’s just close this.
So that we can appreciate that the fillable fields.
So when you look at the form, you’ll notice that it has – a sort of a table in some blue sections, where you can fill.
And if we click on the first section, we can fill in our name. David, click on tab to go to the next one. And then we can just put in our phone number.
This is just a dummy phone number.
And then our work phone number.
And if you’re filling this form maybe to request for a leave form, to request for maybe your even if it’s a booking form, ensure you fill out the correct information.
Or even if it’s a survey you are taking. Email and go and so on and so forth.
And once you’re done with all the fields, all you need to do, you can just come to the print button here.
And what we need to do is save the PDF, we want to save the PDF, because we’ve already filled it and maybe want to resend it back to the person that required the form to be filled.
And for example, this is a membership form.
If it is something I was signing up for, then I would need to send back form when it is already filled.
So just, come to save. And it’s going to prompt us to save it in a folder of our choice. Just let’s say we call it filled- filled PDF.
And just click on Save.
Once we click on Save, it’s gone, we can just close this out.
And when we look in our folder, we’ll see a filled PDF.
If I just right click> open with Google Chrome, we’ll just notice that our form has been filled and has been saved as a filled PDF form.
So basically, there we have it, David Mbugua, my number, my work, my work number, my email address, and all those things.
And since it is filled, the fields are no longer accessible for anybody to fill that out as they would require.
Because that’s what is the essence of this video to make a fillable PDF form without using Adobe Acrobat, and we just use an application called LibreOffice Draw to create a fillable PDF form.
And since we don’t require this anymore, we can just close it out.
We don’t want to save don’t save. And there we have it.
That’s how you can make a fillable PDF form without using Adobe Acrobat.
It’s easy, it’s simple, and although it is not as automated as what I showed you using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, it works.
And it can help you save some money, especially if you’re on a budget and to cap it all, it is free to use.
Thank you for watching this video.
I highly appreciate if you get any value from this particular content apply it so that you can also learn to create fillable PDF forms.
That’s it for me.
And until next time, never stop learning, subscribe to the channel, like the video and share it with your friends.
Thank you so much for watching this video.