“What’s the point of using smart, online forms in your recurring workflows if you still have to manually update your database(s) with information from completed forms?” asks Ashish Deshpande at Frevvo.

If you’re already using online forms in your business, making sure every submission goes to a database is even more important. And you can’t easily manipulate spreadsheet data - i.e., analyze it, move it into other applications, or run reports with it.” “You may have to do a lot of manual data entry, or manually exporting and importing data to other programs. “Also, getting information into and out of spreadsheets can be clunky,” she adds. Once you’ve collected that data, a database is a much more powerful place to store it than a spreadsheet, writes Annie Pilon, a senior staff writer for Small Business Trends. This is important because data is essential for making better decisions, writes Nicole Fallon-Peek, cofounder and CEO at Lightning Media Partners: “You can easily collect data from customers, prospects, and leads by creating and distributing an online form that provides you with information to help you make data-driven decisions.” There are several reasons a business would want to submit PDF forms to a database rather than save them individually.įirst, turning PDFs into online forms makes data collection significantly easier. Here’s everything you need to know to submit a PDF form to a database.

“Unfortunately, PDF documents do not come with an easy ‘PDF to database’ function which can be used to get hold of your data,” writes Docparser product manager Joshua Harris.Įxtracting data from a PDF doesn’t have to be difficult, though. Perhaps the biggest drawback of PDF documents is how hard it can be to get information out of them. Phil Ydens, vice president of engineering for Adobe Document Cloud, estimates there may be as many as 2.5 trillion PDF documents in existence.īut the file format isn’t without its share of issues. The PDF is a versatile and popular file format.

Import data into pdf form