Background:
At work, we’re quadrupling our employees from 4 to 16 people or so, and as a part of that process I’d like to consolidate our employee timesheets in a central place. In the past they were all done on paper, individually, but people would always forget to fill them out and turn them in on time. We’d have to individually hunt folks down the last day or two, but that becomes impractical when there’s so many more of them now. I thought that putting them online and having them always filled out and ready to print/submit might work better.
The question:
Problem is, the timesheets come in a certain format that must be adhered to (gotta love bureaucracy). They’re just PDF forms with a form field for each day. Is there an easy way to put these PDFs online and make them editable so that people can fill in their times and save them as they go, without needing to manually download and re-upload the whole PDF each time?
An alternative that came to mind was to just give them Google Docs spreadsheets that they fill out, and then I (or a script) will manually transcribe their hours to the actual timesheet PDFs. That’s less work for them but more for me, so any alternatives I hadn’t considered would also be welcome
I don’t think they would much care… they just happen to be PDFs because they get printed out and turned in, as paper, where HR processes it. It’s a stupid, antiquated system that causes a lot of mistakes and delays, but it’s what we’ve got…
Also, I’ve been looking into LiveCycle and FormsCentral. Do those programs help with situations like this? Adobe is not very clear about what those actually do and how they differ from Acrobat Pro. Confusing as heck!
The web site PDFescape lets you edit PDFs online. Seems like it would be a clumsy option though.
I wonder if you might be able to nicely format a Google Docs spreadsheet your users could edit, and then use its built-in Download As PDF feature to generate your PDF directly. Perhaps users input data on one sheet and your form on another sheet grabs that data. (When Google Docs generates a PDF, you can tell it to only print the current sheet, omit the grid lines, and so forth.) You can use scripting right in the spreadsheet to automate some tasks, if needed.
LiveCycle (Designer, presumably), lets you create a type of PDF form (XFA, specifically). Acrobat lets you create AcroForms. They are very different structurally, but both can be filled-in, saved, submitted, and printed with Adobe Reader and some other non-Adobe PDF viewers. AcroForms have greater support with non-Adobe PDF viewers. It is unlikely that LiveCycle Designer will let you do anything that you can’t do with an AcroForm.
FormsCentral does work with PDF forms. The main advantage is it allows a user to securely submit the form data to the FormsCentral server. An administrator can then access the data table, generate reports, export the table, and generate copies of the filled-in form as PDF. The FormsCentral designer application (which comes with Acrobat 11) lets you design and layout simple forms, which can be used as a web form or a PDF form. You have much more flexibility with Acrobat regarding the design and layout, which you’d typically do in some other program such as InDesign.
PDF forms can be saved with Adobe Reader, but have to be Reader-enabled if using a pre-11 desktop (Win/Mac) version. Reader 11 allows saving of non-enabled documents.
For the OP’s application, each user could have a local copy, fill it in each day, and submit the data to FormsCentral. If you don’t want to use FormsCentral, either the data or the entire PDF could be submitted to a web server, or the PDF could be emailed or uploaded to an online repository, etc.
