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Filling official forms in bulk

These forms are designed to be filled in one at a time, by hand. With sixty to prepare, that stops working.

Get the form from the source

Always from the body that issues it, and nowhere else. Official forms are revised, and an out-of-date version picked up from a third-party site can be sent back to you. In France that means service-public.fr and the relevant department’s own site; elsewhere, the equivalent authority.

What makes these forms awkward

They are almost never fillable. The PDF is a drawing, clicking does nothing, and you have to draw the areas yourself. That is covered in filling a PDF with no fields.

They often use character boxes, one letter per cell. Text dropped on without care never lines up.

And their layout is not yours to change. The office receiving the form expects to recognise it, so rebuilding it in a word processor is not an option.

How to go about it

1. Download the current version of the form from the official site.
2. Open it and draw the areas to fill. For runs of boxes, use the field type meant for them: you say how many boxes and where, and each character centres in its own.
3. Prepare the spreadsheet, one row per case.
4. Map the columns, look at the preview, then generate. The preview shows a real copy rather than an approximation, so you can see straight away whether a long name overflows its boxes.

Once the template is set up it is saved. Next year, if the form has not changed, only the spreadsheet needs replacing.

Checking before you send

Documents produced in bulk should be checked in bulk. Generate two or three rows first, picking the longest and the shortest, and actually open the files.

Include a row with an accented or non-English name. That is the case that exposes encoding problems coming from the spreadsheet.

Finally look at one amount and one date once formatted, to be sure a day-month date has not been read the American way round.

What the tool does not do for you

Publiposter writes what you give it, where you tell it to. It does not check that the form is valid, that the data is right, or that you picked the correct form in the first place. All of that stays with you.

Page last revised 2026-09-01