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OutSmart Guide

Creating A Form From A PDF

If you already have a form as a PDF, whether it is one you built years ago or one a college or association publishes, you can upload it and OutSmart builds a SmartForms V2 version of it for you. You get an editable form with the questions and answer choices already in place, so you are correcting a draft instead of typing it out.

Before you start

Building a form from a PDF is available on OutSmart Basic and OutSmart PRO subscriptions. If your subscription does not include it, the option appears but cannot be used, and it tells you so.

Uploading the PDF

  1. From the main menu, choose Smart Forms > SmartForms 2.0.
  2. Click Create New.
  3. Choose the option to build a form from a PDF.
  4. If you are an admin, you are asked Who is this form for? first. Every form belongs to a practitioner, so choose the practitioner it is being built for.
  5. Select your PDF and start the conversion.

While it works

Building the form takes a few minutes, so it runs in the background. You do not have to sit and wait on the page.

A row appears in your Smart Forms list showing that OutSmart is building your form from this PDF. You can leave the page, work on something else, and come back to it. When it finishes, the new form appears in your list ready to edit, and if it was the only one you had running, the editor opens for you.

If something goes wrong, the row tells you why. You can dismiss it, and it clears itself after a day either way.

What to check before you send it

A converted form is a draft. It is much faster than starting from nothing, but the PDF was written for paper and some things do not carry across cleanly. Open it in the editor and check:

  • Question types. A tick box on paper might come across as a single choice where you wanted several, or the other way around.
  • Answer choices. Make sure every option that was on the page is there, and that nothing has been merged.
  • Required questions. Nothing on a PDF says which answers are compulsory, so set those yourself.
  • Instructions and headings. Text that is guidance rather than a question is better as a Text block, so it is not recorded as an answer.
  • Consent and policy wording. Check this especially carefully. It is your clinic’s wording and it carries weight, so read it against your original rather than assuming it came through intact.

The form is yours to edit until the first time you send it to a patient. After that it locks. See Editing A Smart Form.