It has really been a long time since I have been quite as impressed by the ease and simplicity of a business program. OmniForm from Caere – the makers of OmniPage – simply blew my breath away with its ease, simplicity and power.
   You should know that forms are the bane of existance for anyone in the printing business. People come in with a few ideas scratched on a piece of paper and expect these super-duper forms to materialize almost instantly, all typeset and pretty. Or they have an "old" form, yellow and torn and obviously the last one in the box, that needs to be reproduced. "You want it when???"
   Graphic designers, who would rather be graphically designing pretty things, then mumble under their breaths while the slave away with PageMaker or some other program to get all the lines to fit, all the boxes to be even and the like. The result is usually "just a few changes" from the customer and many more mumbles from the designer.
   If you think that's a hassle, consider Joe Blow who "wonders" whether he could set up a "little thing" on his computer to take orders or fill out customer complaint forms. You can do this in Visual Basic, Alpha 5 or a host of other programs. All you need to know is how to write database programs.
   Are you getting a headache?
   OmniForm is Excedrin, Bufferin and aspirin all rolled into one.
   Let's start with the "old form." Put it into your scanner. Remember, the folks at Caere have been scanning and performing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for years. OmniPage is the premier package for this sort of thing.
   Taking that ability, they do a great job of recognizing those forms. And converting many of the elements into usable fields (we'll get to that in a moment) if that is what you want to do. But, in experiments conducted right here in the Rainbow-PCM Test Center, about 85 percent of the stuff came out of OmniForm's scanning process ready to use. Big sigh of relief from the designer, who fired up her airbrush and went back to doing something she considered "ultimately more creative."
   With extremely powerful, but easy to use, editing tools, you can adjust the elements of the form with ease. When the time comes for those "few changes," its a couple of minutes. We're talking evenly spaced lines, check boxes lined up perfectly. All that designer "mumble" stuff.
   Take that form and print it. Take it to the printer or photocopier. You've got forms. Good forms, too. Including graphics. Jazzy stuff. You name it.
   The cost of having a designer design a form is pretty darn high. It takes time. Designers don't work for peanuts. And the printer has to figure in the "mumble factor." You will save money the very first time you use OmniForm. Buying the program is cheaper than buying a designer to design your form.
   Well, the truth is everyone uses forms. For the process of designing a form, either from scratch or reproducing (and especially modifying) a current form, OmniForm simply cannot be beat. Period.
   That's the old way. You fill out a stack of forms, do whatever you want with them, and then stick (excuse me, file) them in a cabinet. There are elaborate systems for keeping track of these files and we won't go into them. Usually, though, the ability to find something diminishes somewhat when the file clerk leaves.
   The new way is database filing. The good thing is the programmer won't mumble. But he will charge out the Willie Wazoo. For the cost of a week's worth of the programmer's supply of Jolt, you can get OmniForm.
   Because, what you should know is that while you're creating this form with WYSIWYG on the screen, OmniForm is working there behind the scene, creating a database. No kidding. So when you need to find the form again, you simply "find" it. Claudia Clerk can quit any time. Even the boss can do it.
   Its a darn good database, too. Very functional and it will use an imput form you're familiar with – the form itself.
   I am truly impressed with OmniForm and you will be too. It will save you time, save you money and do it in a no-nonsense manner. Whether your business is small or huge, OmniForm is the answer to your form prayers.

   Link to the Caere web site.