Hey everyone, Kevin here. Today I want to show you how you can create a fillable PDF form entirely for free. If you’ve ever wanted to create a PDF form before, you probably found that you have to get Adobe Acrobat and it works pretty well, but it does also carry a hefty price tag of $15 per month. Today I’m going to show you some free software that will allow you to create fillable forms. All right, well, let’s jump on the computer and let’s get started. To create a PDF form, we’re going to use an application called LibreOffice. You can get this at the website libraryoffice.org. I’ve also included a link in the description of this video. You can just click on that and that’ll bring you to this website. LibreOffice is kind of like Microsoft Office. It has a similar set of applications. The main difference is LibreOffice is entirely free, and it’s also open source. Once you land on the home page, you’ll see a pretty prominent download now button. Let’s click on this. On the next page, you’ll see the version of LibreOffice that you can install. I chose to go with the most recent version. Over here on the right-hand side, you can choose your operating system. It works across all different major platforms. Choose your operating system and then click on download and run through the installation process. Once you finish downloading and installing LibreOffice, go down to your taskbar and type in LibreOffice Writer. We’re going to use the Writer program to pull together our form and then to save it as a PDF form. This drops me into LibreOffice Writer, and if you’ve ever used an authoring app before, chances are this will look very familiar. Here you have things like being able to choose the fonts, the size, you could set alignment, and then here down below, we have our canvas where we can start building our form. Now you probably noticed that I already started creating just the basics of what I want to turn into a form. So, with the Kevin Cookie Company, I put our logo up on top, I typed in a header, and then I also inserted a table with some different questions. Now right now it’s not a form yet. This is just the basic structure and I want to turn this into a form. To create this area here, I simply used tables. You could insert a table. You could define the number of columns and rows and you can very easily format something that looks like this. If you really just want to follow along and do exactly what I’m doing, I’ve included a link to this file in the description, so you can click on that and then you can follow what I’m doing. Within LibreOffice Writer, they have a whole bunch of very rich form tools and controls. If we look up on top at all of these different menus, there’s one called form. That seems pretty promising, let’s ckick on that. Within the form menu, we have all of these different tools, and right here, you can insert things like text boxes, checkboxes, option buttons. They’re all these different options that we have here, and we’ll run through what these do. But before we do that, I want to show you an even easier way to build a form. Instead of needing to go up to this menu here, click on form, and then choose the box that we want to insert. Instead, we can go over to the view menu up on top. If we click on view, let’s go down to toolbars, and within this list, we see all these other toolbars that we can turn on. One of them is called form controls. Let’s click on this one. This opens up a set of form controls and it sits right up alongside our document, and this has a similar set of controls to what we have in this form menu. Now at least, personally, I think it’s a little bit easier to access and easier to build out a form when you have it sitting right next to your form. Here I can simply drag things over and start building things out instead of needing to go up to this menu. OK, we now have all the tools that we need to start building out this form, and before we start inserting different items into our form, I want to turn on one thing. If we go over to all of our tools over here, there’s an option called form design. Let’s click on that. When we click on form design, you’ll notice that it adds an extra toolbar down here, and all the way on the right-hand side of this toolbar, there are two options. One of them is display grid. So, here we can turn on a grid. It helps with aligning different fields on this form. Also, there’s another option called snap to grid, and when you turn on snap to grid, let’s say you want to insert a text field, or maybe you want to insert some option buttons. This will help to just make sure you get everything aligned just right. Now that I have snap to grid turned on, I’m ready to start building my cookie order form. The quicker I can build this, the quicker I can start getting orders. The first question here is your full name. I need someone’s name if they order cookies, otherwise who am I sending it to? Over on the right-hand side, here I have all my form controls and one of them is for a text box. This seems like a good one for someone to enter their name into. To insert a text box, I’ll click on this option and here you see it’s now pressed in. When I bring my mouse cursor over, you’ll see that there are cross hairs here, and I can now draw my text box. So, let me draw it right here next to your full name, and once I’m satisfied with the position, I’ll release. I’ve now inserted my text box and people can start typing in their name here, but I also have the option to configure some properties for this text box. Here I can double click on the text box and here I have a whole bunch of different properties that I can configure. For example, right up near the top, I can type in a name for this text box, and textbox 1 really isn’t that descriptive, so here I can change it to your full name. As we look down here, there are a whole bunch of other properties that I can also configure. I want to call out some of the ones that I found more interesting. Right up here near the top, you can set the max text length. So, let’s say you want someone to type in a response, but you don’t want them to type in too much. You can restrict it to a certain number of characters. Right now, it’s set to 0, meaning that people can enter in any number of text that they want. As I scroll down this list, once again, there are many different settings and feel free to go through to see what these different settings are. As I go down, there’s another one called default text, and this is text that will appear in the text box before someone goes in and types something. So, maybe I want to say something like enter your full name here. I also have some other settings like font, alignment, I could even set the border for this text box, so you could go with a 3D look, a flat look, so you have many different options in here. Once again, feel free to go here to see what all you can do. For now, though, I’m satisfied, so I’ll simply click on the X. And check that out! I now have a text box on my form. If I want to test it out, I can go over to my form controls and currently and by default it’s in design mode. So, what design mode means is, well, I could click on the text box, I could jump into properties, but maybe I want to see how it actually works. Well, here I could click on design mode, and this now exits me from design mode. So, now I can click into the text box, and I could try entering text in here. So, let’s say you set a limit to the amount of text, you can actually test to make sure that it works, so just a quick tip on how you can test things out, but for now I want to keep building out my form, so let me go back into design mode. Now that I’m back in design mode, let me continue building out my form. For the next question, I want to know what cookie type someone wants to order and also the quantity that they want to order. Now with the cookie type, we only have a set number of cookies that someone can order. Chocolate chip all the way through white chocolate macadamia nut. So, a text box doesn’t make sense here because someone could type in a cookie that we don’t have. If I look over at the form controls, there’s the option to insert a list box, so I can predefine what the different options are, and then someone can choose from that list. So, here I’ll select the list box and just like before, let me draw my list box on this form. These look like good dimensions, so I’ll release. Now here I have my list box, but there’s nothing currently in this list. Here I can exit design mode and here I can confirm that the list is empty. I’ll go back into design mode, and to define what options should show up in here, just like we did with the text box, let’s double click on this to open up the properties. This opens up the list box properties and just like before, I could go through, set a name, and I have a whole bunch of properties that are similar to the one that we saw with the text box. If I scroll down here, there’s an option here for list entries, and this is where I can define what options show up in the list. I’ll click on this drop down, and right here, this opens up a text box. Here I can start entering in all of the different options. I’ll paste in all of the cookies that we offer here at the Kevin Cookie Company, and in the list, if you want to separate the different options, simply enter in a line, hit enter, and then type in the next option. I’ve typed in the six different types of cookies that we offer, and once I’m done, let’s click on OK. Here now you’ll see all of the list entries. It put it in quotes, and it also used a semi colon to separate them. Now all the other settings look fine to me, so I’ll click out. Back now on the main page, let’s check to make sure it added these items to the list. I’ll exit design mode once again, and when I click on the list, look at this. I now have all of the different cookie options, so it’s working exactly how I want it to. Let’s now go back into design mode. One thing you might have noticed is when we inserted the list box, right next to it, there’s also the option for a combo box. What is a combo box and when would you use that compared to a list box? Well, with a combo box it behaves mostly the same as a list box that we just inserted except along with being able to choose one of the predefined options, you can also type in your own response, so it has a little bit more functionality. Now I’m not going to insert it, but I just wanted to make sure you understand what the difference is and when you might want to use it. Now let’s keep building out this form, and next I also want to know the quantity of cookies that someone wants to order, and right here in the form control, there’s the option to insert a numerical field, so this will require that it’s a number that someone enters. I’ll click on this and just like we’ve been doing all along, here I’ll draw a box and I’ll just make sure to line it up with all of the other boxes. So once again, one of the benefits of turning on snap to grid. Here I’ll insert my box and I’m not going to go in and edit any of the properties. I think they’re all fine as is. Next, I want to have customers fill out their preferred delivery method and at the Kevin Cookie Company, we have three different delivery options, and a customer can only choose one of them, so I don’t want someone choosing two different delivery methods. If I look over at the form control, there’s something called an option button, also known as a radio button. So, here you can only select one option. With the check box on the other hand, you can select multiple checkboxes, so an option button will really work the best for this. Once again, I’ll click on this option and here I can draw my option buttons on the screen. I’ll insert one and let me go through and add three different option buttons. Remember, we have three different delivery methods. Here I’ll put all three in. Now that I’ve inserted my option buttons, I want to customize what these options are. So, here let me click into the first one. Right over here, I can see that it’s option button one and right now the label is simply option button. I want to change this to match what the first delivery method is, and this might sound a little bit unconventional, but we do offer pigeon delivery if you live relatively close to our factory, so I’ll type in pigeon. I’ve now typed in the label, and there’s one more field that’s extremely important to fill in. Here’s something called group name. When we inserted all of these option buttons, we have to call out that all of these are part of the same group. So, that way when I click on one option button, it’ll deselect one of the other ones. Especially if we use option buttons elsewhere on this form, if we don’t use a group name, it’ll think that they’re all part of the same group, and so if maybe I’m in another question, I select one of these option buttons, it’ll deselect the option from a previous question, so over here, I’ll type in a group name called delivery. Next, I’ll click into the next option button and here I want to define the label for this one, and this one is drone delivery. Yes, this is a little bit friendlier. We’re not using animals to deliver, but it does require lots and lots of batteries. Right down here, I could also type in a group name, and once again, I want the group name to match the group name from pigeon, because they are going to be in the same group. So here too, I’ll type in delivery. Once I’m done, I’ll click on the X and let me jump into the third option button and for the label I’m going to type in pneumatic tube. If you don’t know what this is when you go to the bank and you’re sending in your, say, check to the teller, you typically use a pneumatic tube. We have quite an advanced system of tubes under cities that we can use to deliver cookies. Right down here, I also want to make sure I add it to the same group, so I’ll type in delivery. Once I’m done, let’s click on X. Next, I want to enter in the desired delivery date, and over here, there’s the option to insert a date field. I’ll select that and just like we’ve been doing all along, I’ll draw out this box. When I click into the box, here too I can also access the properties, and here I can set what the date format looks like. I’m just going to leave it set to the default and then close this out. Next, I want to enter in a text field where people can type in how they heard about us, and you’d really be surprised, but when I ask people how they heard about us, some people tell us their life stories. So, I need to make sure I put in a text box that allows a little bit of space for people to express themselves. Over here in the form controls, once again, let’s insert a text box and just like we’ve been doing all along, just draw it within this area of the table. I’ve now inserted my text box. Let’s double click on it. This opens up the text box properties and I’ll leave most of these defaults as is, but there is one interesting one. If we go down here, right now we’ll see that the text type is set to single line, so I’ve inserted a pretty big text box, but right now it’s only a single line. If I click on this, I can set it to multi-line, so here they can type in a lot more text, or you could even do multi-line with format. I’m going to set it to multi-line. That looks good and then I’ll close out. Let’s test this out. Here I’ll exit design mode and I can type in the box. I’ll type in hello and here now I can go down and I can type in multiple lines. Look at that, so now someone can type in a whole bunch of text about how they heard about us. On this form, I have a little bit of extra space at the top and this is just like your standard authoring tool. I can click up there and I can hit the delete key and that removes that extra space, and even down below, I have a little bit of extra space underneath my text box. Here I’ll click the backspace key and that too will also remove that extra space, so it’s very easy to move things around and to format it, so your form looks exactly how you want it to look. Now I’m almost done creating my form. I’ll go back into design mode and here I want people to check that they agree with our terms. I want to just make sure if you’re placing an order that you agree with all these terms. Over in the form control, I can insert a check box, and here I’ll place it right here, and I can just draw out the checkbox and that looks pretty good. Let me expand this just a little bit and let me double click in. Here I can see the label and maybe I’ll add some text that says I agree with the terms. Once I’m all done, I’ll click on the X and here now you see the checkbox. Now it looks like the S is a little bit cut off here, so I can go back, click on the checkbox, and let me expand it a little bit so all the text appears. Now right now, this form is looking pretty good, and I think I’m ready to turn it into a PDF. To turn this into a PDF, it’s extremely easy. Right up here on the top bar, there’s an icon right here that says export directly as PDF. Let’s click on that. This opens up the Windows file picker and I can now type in a file name for my PDF. Let me call this cookie order form. Once I’m done typing in the file name, I’ll go over here and click on save. I’ve now successfully exported this file as a PDF. However, I do want to show you one other way you can export your form, that gives you a little bit more control, if that’s what you desire. Let’s go up to the top left-hand corner and click on file. On this list, there’s an option to export as and here we can export as PDF. Previously we exported directly as a PDF, but let’s go here to see what other options we have. This opens up a prompt with a whole bunch of different PDF options, so you can set the pages that you want to export, and over here, there’s the option to create a PDF form. We want this to be a form, so we want to make sure that’s checked. Here you could also choose the submit format, so you can go with FDF, PDF. You have a number of different options for creating your form. Now for the most part, I’m going to leave these as is, but I did want to show that you do have a few additional options. Let’s now open up the form that we created. Here now I see my new cookie order form and it’s a PDF file. Let’s click into this to see how it works. This opens up the PDF form and we now have our own PDF form. Congratulations, we successfully created it. Here I can go through and here I see the text box and it includes our default text. Here I could type in my name. I could also choose my cookie type and look at that, the drop-down list is working just like we expected. I’ll choose chocolate chips and I am hungry, so I’m going to order 999 of these. It’s going to be a big order. Down below, we have our preferred delivery method and remember we turned these into a group, so here when I check or select one of these option buttons, it’ll switch the selection. I can fill out the rest of this and here I’ll agree to these terms. I didn’t read the text, but I’m sure it’s pretty reasonable. Now, right up above, we can print out this PDF, and when I print it, it will print out everything that I filled out in this form. Also, if I decide I want to save this form, it will save all of my different entries. So, it truly is a fully functional PDF form, and once again, we were able to do this for free using LibreOffice Writer. How cool is that. All right, well, that’s how easy it is to create a fillable form. If this video helped you, please give it a thumbs up. To see more videos like this in the future, make sure to hit that subscribe button. Also, if you want to see me cover any other videos on this channel, leave a note down below. All right, well, that’s all I had for you today. I hope you enjoyed, and as always, I hope to see you next time, bye.