I am a newbie to LO.
I want to put a button on a form which will send the completed form to an email address. I have added a button to the form and saved the form as a pdf. The button in the pdf doesn’t do anything. What am I doing wrong? Is there a simple guide to this elementary requirement?
Many thanks.
Maybe this comment will help with your “elementary requirement”, When I save my forms into PDF the macros do not works in PDF. How to fix it? - #6 by Wanderer
Thanks for your reply.
I regret your suggestion did not help me.
This video
suggests my requirement is easy. I followed it, but the result does not work.
Maybe LO has moved on?
This sire has the same process : 4 Ways to Create Fillable PDF Form with Submit Button to Email - itselectable but whilst I can create an email with the button, the form is not attached to it, and the pdf I make from the LO form, though it has a button which behaves visually like a button produces no email. Help!
The 4th method in your last comment, which relates to LibreOffice, works for me.
Did you add the mailto: in the URL immediately before the email address in Form Properties?
Did you select FDF in the export dialogue? I also selected Lossless compression for graphics by habit but that shouldn’t have anything to with it.
You would also need to set up a database or spreadsheet to accept the fdf data from the attachment in the returned email as it is just the form contents that are returned. The body of the email contains this text:
The attached file contains data that was entered into a form. It is not the form itself.
The recipient of this data file should save it locally with a unique name. Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 or later can process this data by importing it back into the blank form or creating a spreadsheet from several data files. See Help in Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 or later for more details.
Double-clicking on the attachment in the email asks if I should open it in Adobe Reader. I get an error message
But after navigating to the original pdf form it fills in the data in the appropriate fields.
Thanks for your further reply.
My requirement is for a fillable pdf form to be completed by a subject, then sent by a button to a manager who will condense the data in the form manually into a management database.
My enquiries on the Web suggest that LO can do this.; please see my earlier emails for the results I get.
I have set the recipient of the form as required. I note that my half solution only creates the email biur does not send it, and as I say, it has no form attached to it.
I’m stumped.
I thought that you might have erred somewhere in the steps, so I suggested a couple of places that weren’t clear in the 4 Ways to…
I thought that maybe you had an older version of LibreOffice so I tested in LO 7.3.7.2 and that is fine too. I changed the submit format from FDF to PDF in my PDF Export dialogue but you might prefer HTML or XML.
Can you export my rubbish form to pdf, fill it (or not) and click Submit. Hopefully, the fake email address doesn’t go anywhere, but best to not press send.
TestFormSubmitToEmail.odt (11.3 KB)
I think for it to send the email automatically, instead of just filling out the email, on Submit button might require some scripting and the security issues that raises are probably bigger than any gain from a one-button click.
At first: Neither uploading any of your forms for testing. Then not giving details how you test, wich software you use but so we don’t need to care on versions. (Sometimes I say, with this approach one don’t seek help but pity.)
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One of the points, where your installation is important. Some mail-software will not allow attachments with mailto-links an I hope none will send your mail without manual inspection from mailto-links. (Otherwise I could “steal”/copy any file you can access as attachment of an email…)
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Your “elementary requirement” needs a proper created form as pdf, then a pdf-viewer on the client-side handling the form and a configured mail-program in the (unknown) OS - I think users of webmail only will fail.
Thanks for your kind reply.
I have been using LO 7.2.2.2 on MacOS. I see there are later versions - now I have 7.5.5.2.
Your test form creates an email, but as you argue, there is nothing attached to it - I understand why. The pdf of your test form does not create an email.
On my form, Form and Control properties both set correctly, but now I don’t even get creation of an email from either the form in LO (Design Mode OFF) or its pdf.
Thank you Wanderer for your reply.
Please see my reply to EarnestAI.
For me, creating the pdf and submitting the form created an email with a message and the attached pdf to be returned.
You created the pdf OK so your pdf settings are OK. Submitting the form created the email but not attachment which seems to be the email software as suggested by @Wanderer or a security restriction. You could try the webmail route and see if that works for you.
That your .odt generated pdf does not create an email suggests an error in the .odt or possibly a security intervention of some sort.