Stat Bar of Michigan, Probate and Estate Planning Section, May 2002
LETTER FROM THE
CHAIR
As I write this in prospect of you all reading this column
in short sleeved shirts and hopefully air-conditioned comfort, it is in fact
sweater and jacket weather up here in the Northland. Cherry blossoms have not yet even broken from the buds.
Nonetheless, the cockles of my heart have been warmed by a felicitous
discovery that I want to share with you. For
a long time, I labored under the misapprehension that forms accessible by Adobe
Acrobat from a website either had to be printed off in blank or if they were
“fill-in” forms, could only be filled in and printed but couldn’t be
saved. Other learned and computer
savvy persons agreed that this was a nuisance limitation on the usefulness of
these .pdf forms. While I seem to have an alarmingly large collection of
ballpoint pens, roller ball pens and mechanical pencils, I do not own a single
pocket protector nor do I wear birth control glasses, thus my true credentials
as a computer geek are suspect at best. Nonetheless,
here is what I discovered. You can
in fact, fill-in, save and print these .pdf forms if they have fill-in
functionality if you have Adobe Acrobat 4.0 or higher.
This is available free. Despite
some comments on programs that you need Adobe Acrobat 5.0 to do this, it may not
be so.
As an example of how the procedure works, go to the Supreme
Court SCAO forms site. You will
find this at http://courts.mi.gov/scao/forms.
You can go to it directly or you can go to it from ICLE’s site by
locating it under the LINKS tab. You
can fill-in these forms on the website; however, with unskilled fingers it is
very easy to bounce yourself out of the form and even out of the website and
have to start all over again. Therefore,
saving the form to your own files is the preferred procedure.
Note here that saving it onto your own hard drive without taking special
note of where you are putting it is the recipe for disaster.
Your odds of being able to find it again are low, at best. Therefore,
it is recommended that you save it into the specific client folder or some other
folder that you will recognize as being the repository for such forms.
In order to save it, you will have to follow a rather specific procedure:
Back to the SCAO forms, first click on Estates and Trusts under
the list of categories of forms. Pick a trial form, such as Application for Informal Probate
(PC 558.pdf). Here is the first
critical step, RIGHT click on the form number (PC 558.pdf). From the window that will come down, LEFT click on “Save
Target As”. From the SAVE
window, select the folder that you want to save it in, click on “Save” and
exit the SCAO website. Reopen the
file where you have saved it, with Acrobat, not with the word-processing program
and fill out the form and save it filled out and print it.
For a test of whether this works or not, fill out the first couple of
lines of the form, save it, print it, exit it and reopen it and see if the
filled in form survives the exit and reopen. Dah Dahh!!
The same procedure as well works with the IRS fill-in
forms. The problem is in locating
them. Since they are not under the
first set of forms that comes up on the IRS website, in order to get the blank
forms that can be filled in, you need to go to this website: http://www.irs.gov/forms_pubs/fillin.html
(Please note the underline between the words “forms” and “pubs”).
From the first window that comes up on the above website, select the form
that you want. Below the window,
click on the box Review Selected Forms and up will come the name of the
form that you have requested. Here,
RIGHT click on the blue form name and then LEFT click on “Save Target As”.
Proceed as above to fill out the form from your saved form in the client
file.
Armed with information like this, computers and the
internet start acting the way they are supposed to, as obedient and useful
helpers, as opposed to wicked and mischievous elves.
Yours truly,
John A. Scott, Chair
JAS/cah