PDF's won! The battle is over and they're the default digital document for our modern computing age - although ODF may try to disagree.* Of course, if you need to send someone a digital document, you obviously have a number of options.

You can point them to a web page - most people have access to a web browser. You can send them a Microsoft Word document and hope they have something to open it - Google Apps is free. You can always send plain text or an RTF document - they're pretty universal.

But, if you want pictures and graphs and a pretty layout to boot, then you're probably looking at PDFs as your format of choice.

Then there's real-world forms. You know, the analog to digital conversion we'll be making for years to come. The one where many organizations are mired down by forms and processes which still deal with physical paper.

While filling out a PDF form is often a simple matter of acquiring a free or inexpensive app, it's much nicer to just capture the data directly into your data warehouse right off the bat. Being able to also output the form is just what may be needed for that digital migration.

Fortunately, for us FileMaker users and developers, it's pretty darn easy to make the data capture process really easy for PDF forms. Being able to send them right back out is also a simple matter. This video walks through the process of taking a PDF form and integrating it into a FileMaker based workflow. How far you go with what is shown is only limited by your imagination!

*ODF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument)

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