Reset form or Clear form in PDF by Zaweba: which to use

Two commands in the Form menu look alike at first and do quite different things. Reset form puts the form's own starting values back. Clear form empties everything that can be changed. Knowing which is which saves you from wiping out something you meant to keep, or from leaving behind something you meant to remove.

Both live under Form in PDF by Zaweba, and both work on the whole form at once, so they are best used deliberately rather than as a quick undo.

The difference in one example

Picture a booking form where the country field starts out filled with United Kingdom, a check box for the newsletter starts ticked, and the name and address boxes start empty. You fill in your name and address, change the country, and untick the newsletter.

Reset form takes you back to how the form arrived. Name and address go blank again, the country goes back to United Kingdom, and the newsletter box is ticked again. Those starting values were set by the person who made the form, and Reset form honours them.

Clear form ignores them. Name, address and country all end up empty, and the check box ends up unticked. Everything that can be changed is emptied, whatever the form started with.

When to reset

Reset is the right choice when you want to reuse a form exactly as it was designed. If you keep a blank order form and fill a copy each week, Reset form after saving a filled copy gets you back to the clean starting point, defaults and all. It is also the safer choice when you are not sure what the defaults were, because it puts back exactly what the form's maker intended rather than your guess.

It suits forms made by someone else too. Many official forms come with sensible starting values, such as a standard option already chosen. Reset keeps those.

When to clear

Clear is the right choice when the defaults themselves are wrong for you, or when you need a truly empty form. If you are preparing a form to print and fill by hand, an empty one may be better than one with ticks already in it. If you made the form yourself in Prepare form and gave fields test values while you were building it, Clear form is a quick way to remove them all before you send it out.

Habits that keep you safe

Save first. Both commands change the whole form, and a saved copy of the filled form means nothing is lost if you pick the wrong one. A sensible habit is to save the filled form under its own name, then reset or clear the working copy for the next use.

Check the result in the form fields panel. It lists every field with its current value, so after a reset you can see which fields came back with starting values, and after a clear you can confirm everything is blank.

Remember that Read-only fields are not something you can change by typing, and a clear is about the fields that can be changed. If a field still shows a value afterwards, it is worth looking at its flags in the panel.

Where they sit among the other form tools

Reset and Clear are about getting back to a starting point. Importing form data does the opposite, filling many fields from a file in one step, so a common pattern is to reset a form and then import a fresh set of values into it. Flattening is different again. Once a form is flattened its fields are drawn into the page and are no longer live, so there is nothing left to reset or clear. If you want to keep a reusable form, keep an unflattened copy.

Small as these two commands are, they make PDF by Zaweba much easier to use with forms you fill again and again, and they work entirely offline.