I'm looking for a web app that makes it easy to recreate paper forms (preferably drag and drop), and then save the information in a database, and generate custom reports (again, preferably drag and drop). Anyone know of any small companies doing a good job with this, or any decent open source products?
Both Google and Zoho -- both open source and free -- have a simple WYSIWYG drag-n-drop form creator which you can then publish and receive results in a linked spreadsheet.
There are several web2email form management solutions on the market. Some that come to the top of mind are emailmeform, formsite, icebrrg, wufoo, and jotform. A little simple programming would push tese into the a database of your choice.
If having it go into more than a spreadsheet-- but an actual database -- my recommendation is to deploy a CMS. Most of the good open source CMS -- Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress (?) -- have form management extentions which caputre data, put it into the same mySQL database that drives the CMS. I use Joomla and we love Chronoforms. You could deploy a version with just the form onto a subdomain of your site.
LimeSurvey is one of the base scripts/programs in Fantastico. Fantastico is a script library for easy one click program installation ont your server. It lives as an application on CPanel. Most web-hosting companies that provided shared hosting on Apache servers have CPanel and Fantastico availabile. LimeSurvey is an releatively easy open source survey tool -- which can make forms and drive them to a mySQL database. It has a farely good extraction options for reporting as well. For a non-techie it is a tad overwhelming to install on a server directly. Fantastic will make it easy.
Good luck! I hope you capture the information that you need!