If you use your Mac to run your business, but you still buy invoice and order fomis from a stationer, or you hack forms together in MacDraw or PageMaker, forms software is worth investigating. While many other products have already been introduced, Claris’ SmartForm Designer 1.Ov1 combines a well-tuned set of features that might finally convince you to turn to genuine forms software.
SmartForm competes with Adobe’s True Form and Power Up Corporation’s Fast Forms. All three products address three separate functions: reproducing existing paper forms, creating new forms, and filling out forms.
Designer Forms
The key advantages of filling out forms electronically include entry validation, automatic calculations, and better record keeping. If company policy dictates the use of an existing design, you may simply want a quick way to duplicate your current paper forms on the Mac. The best bet in this situation is to scan them into Adobe’s True Form. SmartForm and Fast Fonns, in contrast, allow you to create custom-tailored forms that can be changed almost instantly.
SmartForm divvies up its major functions into two separate programs: SmartForm Designer handles creating the forms, and SmartForm Assistant lets you fill them out. If you plan to stick with paper forms, you just need Designer to draw them up; you can then print them on a LaserWriter or a Linotronic. For filling out forms electronically, you’ll need to buy additional copies of Assistant for everyone who works with the forms.
Form and Function
Designer has few layout tools, but they’re ideally suited to the task they address: accurate placement of simple, often repetitious elements ... In addition to conventional text tools, drawprogram lines, rectangles, and ovals, you get several types of tools for creating fields, which are areas for entering data. As in a good drawing or desktop publishing application, you can have any of these objects snap to an underlying grid or place them using numeric coordinates. Improving on a similar Fast Forms feature, the flexible Super Duplicate command lets you make multiple evenly spaced copies of an object and place them using numeric coordinates or the mouse. Designer also permiLs you to define master pages, so that elements such as logos can appear on every page.
Designer’s text capabilities are complete. Each font comes in eight styles — including condensed, extended, and reverse type — and a full range of font sizes from 4 to 127 points. Designer makes it easier than most programs do to enter text within an oval or rectangle — all you have to do is select the oval or rectangle and start typing.
Intelligent Red Tape
Although Designer’s layout tools make form design faster, you could get the same results with a drawing or DTP application. What really separates Designer and its competitors from general-purpose layout software are the built-in features that help you enter and even analyze data.
But even the simplest SmartForm field has some smarts: for example, when you press the Tab key in Assistant, the cursor jumps from field to field, according to the order you define in Designer. And fields in SmartForm can be a lot more than passwe data receptacles. You can enter a default value, define constraints or validation criteria, or offer a list of choices for entry. You can write help messages for individual fields, or for invalid entries ...
Fields can also be calculated: an obvious example would be the total field at the bottom of a sales slip. In addition to ordinary single-item fields. Designer offers three other field types: one for automatically calculated numbers such as the form number or page number; one for tables of entries, called lists; and one for repeating custom-defined groups of fields.
The lack of a data entry facility is Designer’s most irksome fault. While you can place text into the form you’re designing, you can’t test the form’s formulas or its field-validation functions without switching over to Assistant. For those who want to add logos or some other type of illustrations Designer’s inability to import EPS graphics, or for tliat matter MacPaint files, will be another drawback — though you can import the images via the Clipboard as PICT files.
An Able Assistant
SmartForm Assistant bears the relatively simple responsibility for form fill-out. Unless you fill out forms for long periods at a stretch, Assistant has a noticeable drawback; unlike Fast Forms, whose DA gives you access to forms at a moment’s notice. Assistant is a stand-alone application. Also, you’ll be disappointed with Assistant if you’re looking for an easy way to get your entries into a database. Although Claris promises that future Smart series products will provide database links, all Assistant can do now is export the contents of one form at a time to a standard text file.
Still the SmartForm package excels at its current mission. And with Claris’ aggressive pricing of Assistant — $5 per copy at the bulk rate — SmartForm is certainly the most economical way to convert to electronic forms.
Cummings, Steve. (July 1989). SmartForm Designer. Macworld. (pgs 145-146).
Clearview Software
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smartformdesigner.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
