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Which is the fault of the users, not the applications. Microsoft Office offers much better ways to do that sort of thing.

They seem like a step up from paper to me. You can still convert them to paper, do not need to drive to the DMV to get them, and have the option of filling them in with the keyboard if your handwriting is terrible (like me).

Are they a dream borne from an angel? No. Are they better? I think so.

I can't go into so much detail about it, but some companies I had to deal with had a form that was MS Word. ("More than 50 pages of check list" which used one of those fields, in which I had to check mark each one of them.)

They had MS Word and PDF version of it, which PDF version wasn't even fillable form. Somehow those forms are a real pain to work with. One time, I just printed out the entire thing out of the PDF and just hand-checked them, and another time, I've used Preview app on Mac to check those by annotation. Either way, they were very annoying...