Announcing: Adobe FormsCentral

You asked; we’ve answered—and now you can keep asking for answers using Adobe FormsCentral, the new cloud-based form creation, distribution and collection service from Adobe. With its sleek interface, intuitive tool kit, and in-line data collection mechanism, creating forms and collecting answers has never (never!) been easier. Below, we’re skimming over a few of the highlights of FormsCentral; stay tuned over the next few weeks for some deeper dives into the product’s features.

Easy-as-pie form builder

Whether you’re building your form from the ground up, or getting a head start with one of our FormsCentral templates, you can add and remove your form’s questions and formatting with just a click. Choose from a number of different kinds of elements to include, such as text boxes, static images, single or multiple choice fields, dropdown menus, checkboxes, and more! The handy Forms Palette lets you pull these elements into your form and put them exactly where you want them—or quickly and easily remove them.

Customize, customize, customize

Every part of your form is for you to design: background color, text color and size, font choice, and header. Drop in your company logo; choose the form colors to support your brand; or emphasize text with formatting. FormsCentral allows you to create your forms according to your standards and style – no holds barred.

Test the form before you go live

Now that you’ve completed your form, take it for a test drive! In Preview mode, you’ll go through the form and see it exactly as your recipients will, allowing you to make sure the user experience is one you’re happy with. You can even go through the whole process and submit a test response to see how the responses will appear in your table. No surprises, no panic attacks, no late-night form tweaking.

Hypertext Markup Love

Speaking of the people filling out your form: thanks to FormsCentral‘s ability to present your beautiful form to your lucky recipients as HTML, the forms can be filled out by anyone with a web browser and internet connection. That means the form is fillable on virtually any device, including tablets and smartphones, from any screen that’s hooked up to the World Wide Web.

Instantly collect and use response data (as a team or on your own)

Once the responses start flooding in (“Did you see that form?! How amazing! How beautiful! How simple! Let’s go fill it out again!”), you can view them in real time in your form’s “View Responses” tab; since the form lives in the cloud, the responses are securely stored there as they’re submitted. The responses are organized in a table, each of the columns of which correspond to a question on your form. You can filter the data, reorganize the data, edit the data, and—in true Acrobat.com fashion—share the data with collaborators. You can also export the data to .pdf, .xls or .csv if you’d like to bring it out of the cloud and down to terra firma (i.e. your hard drive).

When you’re ready to go check all this out for yourself, scamper on over to formscentral.adobe.com and splash around; we know you’ll like what you see. You can check out some of the sample forms we’ve whipped up to take a look at what the service can do. We also recommend taking a peek at this swell overview video over on Adobe TV to see the service in action! If you’ve got questions, you can send them to formscentral_feedback [at] adobe.com, or comment below.

16 Responses to Announcing: Adobe FormsCentral

  1. Deborah says:
    February 14, 2011 at 5:13 pm

    Very interesting new service! I can see lots of uses for this form creation application. I looked for, but didn’t find any features describing the accessibility of the new service. Perhaps I missed them?

    Can you highlight/discuss the accessibility features? Thanks!

    • Ali Hanyaloglu says:
      February 15, 2011 at 2:55 pm

      Hi!

      We’ll cover that some more in a future post, but know that the forms generated by FormsCentral are HTML forms.

      Thanks,

      Ali Hanyaloglu

  2. Pingback: Tweets that mention The Acrobat.com Blog -- Topsy.com

  3. Pingback: Announcing Adobe FormsCentral « Lori DeFurio

  4. firmtofu says:
    February 15, 2011 at 11:59 pm

    So can these forms be embedded into my site on my contact page?

    • Rebecca Staley says:
      February 25, 2011 at 9:28 pm

      Embedding forms is at the very (very) top of our list for things to include in one of the next releases; we realize how important it is for so many people, so we’re working hard to make it happen. Thanks for your patience, and keep your eyes peeled! We’ll announce it on the blog when embedding forms is supported by FormsCentral.

      Thanks!
      Rebecca

  5. Mike says:
    February 23, 2011 at 5:40 pm

    Hi,

    Looks like a great product. Can we make the forms secure; where a user will have to login to view and complete the form?

    Mike

    • Rebecca Staley says:
      February 24, 2011 at 7:47 pm

      Hi Mike,

      This is a good question. At the moment, anyone who has a form’s URL will be able to access the form and submit a response. However, adding password protection is high on our list of things to add to the service. As we keep garnering feedback from the community on what kind of functionality you’d like to see in here, we’ll be supplementing the current offerings with more nuanced features. So keep us posted, and we’ll do the same here on the blog.

      Thanks for your input!
      Rebecca

  6. Chet says:
    February 23, 2011 at 6:06 pm

    Can you export the data in XML?

    • Rebecca Staley says:
      February 24, 2011 at 7:43 pm

      Hi Chet,

      Not yet – for now, you can export responses as .pdf, .xls, or .csv files; we’re working on adding more robust export features, so stay tuned. You’ll hear it here first.

      Thanks!
      Rebecca

  7. Cass says:
    March 21, 2011 at 10:02 pm

    Sounds great, Too bad it does not support other languages beside English and Latin. I would have subscribed.

  8. jim hayes says:
    June 23, 2011 at 11:30 am

    2 questions – 1) how can I activate/install spell check on a FormsCentral form and 2) can a user save a partially filled out form and re-start before submitting? I have an employee profile form that takes some concentrated effort to fill out, and users may not have the time or information available to fill it out on one attempt. Can they locate their partially filled out form and/or retrieve it?

    • Rebecca Staley says:
      August 19, 2011 at 11:12 am

      Hi Jim,

      At the moment, there’s no spell-check available in FormsCentral, either for installation or automatic inclusion. Sorry about that! As to your second question, the answer is: not yet. We’re working on making it possible to save partially completed forms, but at the moment we have no way to allow that. When we do, we’ll announce it here on the blog, so stay tuned!

      Thanks,
      Rebecca

  9. Sean says:
    July 6, 2011 at 6:45 pm

    After creating a form there is adobe formcentral branding and link below the form.

    Is there a way to remove this branding?

    Also is there a way to do a web form website on our own domain name other than adobe?

    Thanks.

    • Rebecca Staley says:
      July 14, 2011 at 1:31 pm

      Hi Sean,

      At the moment, there’s no way to remove the Adobe FormsCentral information from the bottom of the form, although we’ve heard this request from a few other people. We’ll post back here on the blog if we make a relevant change.

      As for putting the form on your own website, you can embed the form (it is HTML, after all!) by copying the embed code from the “Distribute” tab in FormsCentral. You can then insert that code into your website’s HTML. This embedding method will also work with PDF portfolios. For more details, see: http://blogs.adobe.com/acom/2011/05/embed-your-formscentral-forms-today.html

      Thanks,
      Rebecca