Because then can feed Excel spreadsheets, many third-party on-line forms programs can be used to collect data from clients and initiate a document assembly project.

   A popular program to which we will reference for this discussion is JotForms. It is a free program for light use. It has the logic built in to allow you to create the simplest of forms (names, addresses, etc) but the logic to allow you to create cascading inputs (children >> how many >> appropriate number of input fields.

    Once a user (which can be your office filling out a form on behalf of a client, or the client directly) has completed a form, it can be submitted to you in a variety of ways. The 'default' is simply an email notification, with the data in two columns. This data can be copied and pasted in a Word document table which in turn can be read by Pathagoras' Instant Database. The data can also be downloaded to a csv or Excel file, which in turn can be read by Pathagoras.

   Caveats: The field names you provide for your JotForms should, to the extent possible, marry up with the names used in your Instant Database. However, the 'friendly names' you will want to use in JotForms will not always do so. In such case, you will probably want to create a header row for the Excel spreadsheet with the 'real' IDB variables and overwrite the JotForms provided names. This is easy to do and you can probably write your own macro to accomplish this.