Welcome to the FormReturn Help Guide

FormReturn Optical Mark Recognition Software, with it's own OMR bubble sheet, form designer, is used for automatically capturing hand marked response data from the checkbox mark areas of the forms. The Captured Data can then be exported to a spreadsheet using whichever Office package you have installed on your computer.

A Form ID Barcode added to the form template automates the process of linking the captured response data  with the form template it belongs to, eliminating the need for extra data entry once the form template has been published.

• The Working Components of FormReturn
• Get Started with The Basic Steps

1. Using FormReturn's segment and form editors, create a FormReturn (OMR bubble sheet), form template which can be recognized by the software.
2. Add your respondent's records to a Source data table. Identification of forms is an option but your captured response data will always match to a source data table,(even for anonymous forms in which case an empty table is created).
3. Publish your forms from the form editor and print for distribution to respondents.
4. Scan the returned forms and upload into FormReturn to process the responses into captured data.

Form Return reconciles the captured response data with the published form template information and the records from your data table. The captured data is stored and can then be exported to a spreadsheet.

Note: For capturing response data using Optical Mark Recognition, FormReturn Software is reasonably easy to use but Consideration needs to be taken when designing a scannable form.

Your scanner and the resolution settings you choose, will play an important part in getting a clear image that can be detected accurately by the software.

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• Form Design Components

• Form Recognition Testing

• Adding Source Data Tables and records.
  

• Publication Process

• Data Capture Process

• Managing Captured Data
  

Get Started with The 10 Basic Steps of FormReturn

The most straight forward form identification method of FormReturn for streamline  reconciliation of the captured response data from your forms, is the Form ID Method. This method uses Template Variable Replacement (similar to mail merge) as form identification and reconciles and stores the captured responses against the records from your data table. When you publish the form template, a form for each record from your data table, will be saved as a PDF file on your computer, which can easily be printed from.

1. Create / design a segment and add questions and checkboxes then save the file.

2. Create / design a form:

• Add an empty segment area to the page (to upload your segment into), double click on it, click add segment and select the segment file you just created then click the OK button.
• Add a form ID barcode to the top left of the form page by clicking on the barcode tool then clicking on the form page.
• Add a text area for typing Template Variable replacement fieldnames for form identification. Type the field names like this <<firstname>> <<lastname>>(This is similar to mail merge and you must use fieldnames that are exactly the same as the fieldnames added to your Source data table)

3. Click the recognition preview tab to detect barcodes, segment, fragments and marks.

4. Click the source data icon at the top of the program window. Click add new table to either manually add records, import records via CSV file, or JDBC import.

5. Go back to the form and click the publish forms tab.

• Click refresh on the table panel at the left.
• Click the new name of the table you just created.
• In the publish name area, enter in a new name for the publication you are about to create.
• Click publish and PDF.

6. Print from the PDF file and give to people to complete.

7. Scan the completed forms in using your scanner. Set scanner's resolution to 150 DPI, PNG (preferably) or TIFF format (CCITT group 4, RLE or packbits compression only).

8. In FormReturn, click the processing queue button, then click upload image on the left hand side of the screen. Upload the image (or you can select a folder of images to upload too).

9. Once processed (this may take a while depending on the number of forms you uploaded), click the captured data button. To view captured data, Click the publication name, then click the form tab, then click on the form name, then click the form pages tab, then click the page you want to view.

10. To export the data, Click on the publication tab again, then click the publication name, then click export data.

• Open the CSV file and click OK to open it in excel to view all data for the publication you just created.

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To request free web-based assistance with FormReturn - click here.

The FormReturn OMR software integrates a form designer with OMR capture of response data that gives anyone the ability to design their own customized OMR forms, printed using a regular printer, and automatically capture the handwritten responses from scanned images of the returned forms. (Document scanners)

FormReturn is OMR software (Optical Mark Recognition software) for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux, and is packed with easy to use features for creating custom designed bubble sheets and processing and capturing data from the returned forms using a software based OMR reader.

FormReturn will read and analyze these scanned form images and convert the hand marked responses to electronic data (eg, a spreadsheet of captured response information).

Overview

Form Design and Data Capture Components

Features of FormReturn

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