How to Make a Master Form for Multiple PDF Forms

If you have many PDFs that requires to be filled with lots of shared information, it may be very tedious to fill them each out separately. Master form targets this problem and is a type of form that speeds up this process significantly. It works by first creating an online form that contains all the information that is required – called the master form, then linking this form to the various PDFs that required being filled out. When the master form is submitted, all the corresponding information in the linked PDFs are filled out accordingly. In this tutorial, the steps to creating a master form and linking it to 2 other PDFs will be shown.

First, Click ‘start to build’ and select the master form option. The form builder will come up. In this form builder, there are two parts, with the left showing the various elements, and the right showing the form attributes of each selected element.

Lets add all the different elements that are required by the 2 linking PDFs.

Here we add a text input to ask for the customer’s full name.

Now lets add a check box.

A signature is a common element required in forms, now lets add a signature element.

Lastly, lets add a dropdown element for different countries.

When you think all the required elements are set up, click ‘publish’. Close the pop up share links, and as you can see, the form we just created is right here. Now we can link other PDFs to this master form. Click ‘link’. This will also show you any existing linked PDFs. As you can see, there are no linked PDFs to this master form. Click ‘link new pdf’, and upload the first pdf.

It opens to a form editor for this PDF called the linked form editor. On the left it shows all the elements we just created on the master form, and on the right it has the PDF that we just uploaded.

As you can see, the name input, check box and signature can be added to this PDF.

For the text input, click ‘add to pdf’ and a yellow box will appear on the right. Drag the box to the corresponding area and resize by clicking on it once. The form attributes including font size and colour can also be changed by clicking single line text here.

Similarly. the check box and the signature element can also be added to this form.

After all the required elements are dragged to their corresponding areas, this linked form can then be published.

When we are back to the dash board, click ‘link’ again. As you can see, the pdf we just linked is shown here. Lets link another pdf by clicking ‘link new pdf’. Upload another pdf, the linked form editor will come up. In this PDF, the name input and the countries dropdown element can be added.

Again, click ‘add to pdf’ for both these elements and drag the yellow boxes to to their appropriate positions. The same element can also be added more than once to the same PDF, for example here, we can added the country element again and drag it here. They will both appear in the final PDF when published. When you have added all the required elements, this form can also be published.

Now, we have a master form with 2 linked forms. To share the form, click ‘share’ on the master form menu. Click ‘open in new window’ and a sample of the form will open. This is what the customers will fill out. To demonstrate. Lets complete this form.

Click ‘submit’ when finished. Once submitted, a zipped attachment which contains the 2 now filled out PDFs will be sent to you via email. You can also view it here in submissions. You can download the PDF files or view them. as you can see the first pdf form contains the information we linked previously including name, check box and signature, and the second pdf form also contains the name and also the 2 country elements.

That’s it for this tutorial, thank you for watching.