Moving beyond PDF forms—Introducing interactive documents in Writer

Envisioning a new cross-platform experience to distribute interactive documents others can fill out, sign, and submit.

PDF forms are great. It’s a smart way to digitally fill out and submit legal documents, assignments, surveys, and more. However, between different versions of PDF readers and Microsoft Word’s developer tools, you end up using multiple, sometimes conflicting tools just to manage these forms for your school or business efficiently.

Thanks to everyone who wrote to us, we saw the need for a more flexible, intuitive fillable-documents tool that:

✅ Works instantly across operating systems, without additional installations
📨 Integrates natively with email, electronic signature, and cloud storage services
🔒 Better manages digital rights for the forms currently in circulation
📝 Works with your word processor right out of the box.

Numerous concepts, iterations, and remote meetings later, we think we’ve done just that. We cannot wait to see how you like it!

Introducing interactive documents in Writer.

Here’s how it works:

Design fillable documents from scratch

Insert fillable fields into your documents as you create them. From drop downs to signatures and address fields, we’ve added everything you’d need to create a clean, stylish fillable document.

Publish the document as a form

This is where things get interesting. Apart from collaborating on the document, you can now publish the entire document as a form. Respondents can fill out a document and send a copy of the filled document back to you—without affecting the original document you created.

Try our sample form ✨

This is a great time saver for HR or Finance executives. Employees can now fill out information in the corporate forms themselves and submit it back to the executives, all without having to print or send attached documents back and forth.

Additionally, you can also add options to let users download a PDF copy of the filled document, email it to a different person, or send it to someone for signature.

Automate on-submit actions

The next crucial part we’re announcing today is how you can bring the filled documents back to your ecosystem automatically to keep all the information needed in one unified hub. We brought Zoho Sign into the mix to let you send filled documents for signature and approval as you receive them.

There’s a Zoho WorkDrive integration as well, so you can automatically save a copy of the filled documents to a particular folder with a particular name as they are submitted.

That’s all for now. Comment below to let us know how you like these new updates, or if you’d be interested in an extensive webinar for these features.

Happy writing!

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Read the complete announcement