Hi everyone! It is now tax time and my bone of contention is that the government forms are online and dumb, not smart. I don’t know why they can’t provide us with a “smart form”.
So … I would like to convert this year’s form and send it back to their management to show them how it should be done, so that they could make it available online for future use.
To that end, for the form in question or the alternate non-fillable form , I want to
- convert a **fillable PDF form** into a **LibreOffice Calc** file, then
- add the required formulas to automate the updating of all calculated fields.
That way, if I make changes to any one line entry, because I made a mistake (I’m human, it’s unavoidable), I don’t want to re-calculate (and re-write) all those modified numbers every time I find my mistakes (age is unkind).
So … is there a way that the PDF form could be converted to Calc in a way that would preserve most of the look and feel (a.k.a. format, placement, fonts, sizing, background colours, etc) ?
If not, I guess I would have to do that by hand (nightmare). If forced to do that, is there an easy way to standardize the “cut + paste” of a formatted number field for each of
- [a] Carry-over field (top of page)
- [b] new entry field (basic)
- [c] new entry field (last of list with underline) OR total field (with overhead total line)
- [d] lead-in text field for [a]
- [e] lead-in text field for [b]
- [f] lead-in text field for [c], and
- [g] blocking/outlining of sections,
among the various formatting tasks involved.
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.