Creating And Distributing Acrobat PDF forms
An interactive PDF form is a great way of capturing information from a group of people and Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional makes the creation of these forms a breeze. It also has features for distributing the form and then tracking people’s responses.
The PDF format is a great choice for forms since it will allow the user to see the form exactly as it was created. Web forms, by contrast, can vary depending on the operating system and browser software being used.
There is also immediacy and flexibility of delivery. The form can be emailed to a group of users at the same time. The delivery of the form then becomes a single operation. PDF forms can also be distributed via CDs and DVDs.
Forms are not new to Acrobat: the feature has been available since version 3. However, Acrobat 8 Professional has seen a great enhancement to the way interactive forms are handled.
Forms can be now be created from scratch in Acrobat. Just choose Create New Forms from the Forms menu and choose one of the built-in templates. The form is then created using a utility called Adobe Life Cycle Designer then saved as a PDF file.
As with previous versions of Acrobat, forms created in other packages can be used as the starting point for an Acrobat form. Acrobat 8 Professional will even automatically recognise the form layout and generate form fields automatically.
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional’s Scan From Paper feature also allows you to create an interactive PDF form that is based on a printed document.
After you have created the basic form and perhaps had Acrobat automatically generate your text fields, you can add all the usual form controls, such as check-boxes, radio buttons and combo boxes. Then, to complete the form, you can add a submit button.
Another new feature in Acrobat 8 is to create a form which allows Acrobat Reader users to save form data when they have filled in the form. (This feature is normally only available with a full version of Acrobat.) To activate this facility, just choose “Enable Usage Rights in Acrobat Reader” from the “Advanced” menu.
Acrobat 8 Professional will allow you to distribute the form to a number of recipients via email. This of requires that you have an email client, such as Microsoft Outlook set up on your machine.
Acrobat 8 Professional now contains a facility for storing each of the returned form in one place, called a dataset. As you open each returned form, a dialogue box appears prompting you to add the form data to the dataset.
When you have got back all of the completed forms, you can simply open the dataset where they have all been stored and then export the data in a neutral format. Just click on the Export button and choose whether you want to export as a .csv or .xml file both of which can be imported into a variety of programs for analysis or storage.