Finding and using USG forms at home

Publicly-accessible forms

Many DoS forms are available on the Internet already through the FOIA site, so why reinvent the wheel? All are in Adobe .PDF format, but I haven't found any that are fillable .PDF, only the old-fashioned print-it-out-and-write-on-it forms. Find them at http://www.state.gov/m/a/dir/forms/.

Many other USG forms are available through the GSA as .PDF files. Some forms are in other formats as well, including an earlier version of FormFlow, and a program called Accessible FormNet (there are links for downloading FormNet, but not FormFlow). Try searching here for forms not specific to the State Department: http://www.gsa.gov/Portal/gsa/ep/formslibrary.do.

Using E-Forms on your home computer

Courtesy of the FSI computing gurus, here's a way to work with Intranet-only forms on your home computer. The program you need is called Cerenade Filler. Download the program at http://www.cerenade.com/controls/fillerupdate, and install it on your computer. Now the tricky part is that you need to get the forms to your home computer in .FAR format, which is the E-Forms format. The easiest way to do this is to find the form in E-Forms (through the "FAM & Forms" link on the Intranet homepage), open the form, Download it to your desktop (click on Download the Form), then email it to your home email address. Make sure the attachment is in .FAR format. If you have Cerenade Filler installed at home, it'll open the attachment automatically, and you can work with the form.

What to do if you're at home, and you need a form now? Cerenade makes many DoS forms available on its web site at http://www.cerenade.com/dos/. If you can't find the form you need there, and you're not a telecommuter with Intranet access from home, either drive to the office and email the form to yourself, or call someone who's in the office to ask him/her to email the form to you. :-)

Cerenade Filler works only with .FAR files, the format created when you download an E-Form. It doesn't work with .FRL files, the format used by FormFlow.

DS-189 in Word format

I've created a quick version of the DS-189 (the travel voucher) in MS Word format. I got tired of carrying all my receipts into FSI and sorting through them at a public computer in order to use FormFlow. So I scanned a blank form into a Word document, then inserted some text boxes for the places where you input data. I'm more likely to do my vouchers on time if I can work on them on my home computer after the kids go to bed.