True to form - GreenSoft's GreenForm 1.6 and Caere's OmniForm 2.0 forms generators - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Oct, 1996 by William Harrel

OmniForm 2.0 Rating: *** 1/2

WIN 95/ WIN

Forms impose all types of time-consuming headaches on small businesses. If we're not constantly filling them out, we're creating them for one task or another. From government tax forms to credit applications--every small business needs a more automatic way to create, fill out, and manage forms.

Enter GreenSoft's GreenForm 1.6 and Caere's OmniForm 2.0. The first is an inexpensive, easy-to-use solution that will help most small offices corral their beastly forms. The second is a full-featured solution ideal for offices that are deluged with forms and that need a more comprehensive, automated solution. On the surface, these two packages are quite similar. They allow you to easily create your own forms by drawing and labeling fields or to work with existing hard-copy forms via a scanner or fax. The similarity between these two packages, however, stops here.

GreenForm. Here is a simple application. It differs from OmniForm in several key ways, primarily sophistication and automation capabilities. For example, when you scan a form into GreenForm, rather than using OCR to duplicate it, the program provides you with a bitmapped image.

You then re-create the form by drawing fields over the graphics (lines and boxes) and then retyping the labels. If you plan to re-create many forms, this can be a time-consuming process. However, it is a bit more accurate than the OCR method, which inevitably generates errors you'll have to clean up.

GreenForm uses a spreadsheet-like interface to manage forms and fields, rather than the more sophisticated database method used in OmniForm. Instead of using a search engine to retrieve your forms, you select them from a list. Again, this method works well for offices with a small forms load, but it can get cumbersome for people who use a lot of forms. In addition, a definite drawback to GreenForm is that it is a Windows 3.1 application-though it works fine under Windows 95. But you can't use long file names and some other important features, such as Windows 95's fax and e-mail routing slips. At $49.95, though, this program is a good value, and GreenSoft promises a Windows 95 version later this year.

OmniForm. Compared with GreenForm, Caere OmniForm is the mother of forms software. In addition to automatically converting from scanned or faxed forms to electronic forms, it also has a spell-checker and allows you to save, search, and sort forms in a database. OmniForm's forms accept data from linked fields in Access, dbase and Paradox, allowing for automated form filling from your database records. Thus you can create multiple versions of the same form by simply changing various fields, such as, say, only the Name field. And right-mouse-button pop-up menus that provide choices from database records let you fill fields quickly and virtually automatically.

A Windows 95 application (there is also a Windows 3.1 version in the box), OmniForm provides a wizard-like Form Assistant that helps you create forms in a hurry. If your office routes forms among several people or departments, the program also supports Microsoft Exchange's routing slips. And you can further automate the forms filling process with the OmniForm's Calculations feature, which adds, subtracts, and multiplies figures from various fields and automatically fills in Total fields, among other functions.

Frankly, OmniForm can do just about anything relating to forms. Granted, it costs four times more than GreenForm and takes much longer to learn, but OmniForm can truly automate your forms creation, filling, and management headaches.

--W.H.

DETAILS

GreenForm 1.6

Publisher: Green - Soft, 805-388-1700,

800-588-3375

List Price: $49.95

System Requirements: Windows 3.1,

8MB of RAM, 5MB

of hard-disk space,

scanner