Dear Robo,
Thanks for the response. What I have is a form from the VA that needs to
be filled out. My H/P scanner will scan it in using any of several formats,
and my Word 2003 says to use a TIFF, so I did. When I tried to open it in
Word, I got gibberish. Acrobat, of course, won't let me fill in the blanks. I
am starting to feel really stupid here. I used to have a very small program
called 'Fill-A-Form". it was primitive, but it did the job, then I had a
crash and it went to the Cosmic Bit-bucket. Something tells me I should just
fill it out by hand... any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks
Sygna
When you scan a form, the resulting file is a graphics file, not a Word file.
That's why you can't open it in Word. You could *insert* it into a Word
document, using the Insert > Picture > From File command, but it would still be
just a picture and you wouldn't be able to fill in the blanks.
If you're sticking with Word (probably not a good idea), you'll have to click
the picture, click the Text Wrapping button on the Picture toolbar, and choose
Behind Text. Then you'll have to insert a text box over each form blank to let
you type in information. For a fairly complicated form, this becomes very
tedious and time-consuming.
It looks like this might be the program you had before:
http://www.sharewareconnection.com/fillaform-genie.htm but the download address
doesn't work anymore. Apparently the originator is out of business.
The only other program I'm aware of for scanning forms and turning them into
fillable documents is OmniForm (
http://www.nuance.com/omniform/standard/), but
its price makes it worthwhile only if you scan a lot of forms.
Bottom line: use a pen.
