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Re: Method/Workflow For Marking Up PDF Attachments?

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Spencer_Mullane
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Looking to build some QC tracking logs which would have paper inspection reports from the field as PDF attachments. Ideally I would like for the field inspectors to upload their daily inspection reports via a form which would then notify our QC manager that has he reports to review. He needs to be able to open up the PDF and markup/check off/make notes/annotate various pages before approving or rejecting the report. I do not think this is natively supported (yet, boo, seems pretty useful) but is there a reasonable workflow to make this happen? Overall I am dealing with some fairly non tech savvy folks (construction), but would like to both get better visibility on the process as well as make the process as easy as possible for them. Any thoughts?

3 Replies 3

Hmm, are you comfortable with replacing the PDF with a form instead?  That way the data would still be both easy to key in and structured for visibility

If that sounds good, you can checkout Fillout.com's PDF to Form thingy to see if that saves you some time setting up the form, and you can then integrate that directly into your table: https://www.fillout.com/pdf-to-form

So I had not seen their PDF to form feature yet and having digitized quite a few of our PDF forms on another project manually (for use on plangrid), that process was a GD nightmare. This seems fairly slick though.

I may not be able to get everyone converted over to submitted via form which would be much preferred and way faster, but we are 7 years into this project with forms coming from multiple parties with varying technical skills and/or resistance to change.

That said, I am testing fillout for some other purposes. I'll look into it more, but do you know if there's either a direct way or an elegant work around to building forms in fillout where I can "add" fields from within the form?

The attached image is a sample of part of a typical form we have and I am not quite sure what to call what I want. You can see the table in PDF form at the top has 8 pre-established rows and 7 columns. Sometimes the crew will fill out 1 row, sometimes, 6, sometimes 2, etc. Is there a way to basically have it default to 1 row x 7 columns but then have a plus or an add button at the bottom to add more rows to the form in the field? For example if they only have one row to fill out that day, they will out the one row, put in the single entry field data and signatures at the bottom, and then hit submit. If they needed to put in rows for 3 locations, they would fill out the first, hit add a row, fill out the second, hit add a row, fill out the third, and then do the single entry and signatures at the bottom and hit submit. I haven't found it yet but this seems like a good function if its there somewhere?

Yeap, you'll just need to set up your base with two tables:
1. Table A will be the table that the Fillout form is linked to directly, and will have a linked field to Table B
2. Table B will have the "Description of Work", "Bridge Structure" etc fields

In the form you'd have a linked field available and you'd turn on "Create records":

Screenshot 2024-07-03 at 11.21.42 AM.png

Link to base
Fillout form: https://form.fillout.com/t/pdoV6upY51us