Software & Technology Articles

Creating Rapid Interactive Forms in Adobe Acrobat

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.

Most interactive forms are encountered on the web. However, there are benefits to using PDFs instead. For one thing, the format of the original form is always preserved in a PDF whereas web forms can display differently in different browsers.

When it comes to delivering PDF forms, there are more options than with a web-based form. You can email the form to your audience or perhaps include it on a CD or DVD.

Forms have been a feature of Acrobat since version 3. However, the forms features available in Acrobat 8 are a significant improvement on anything available in previous versions.

Instead of relying purely on other applications to supply its content, Acrobat can now create forms from scratch using a utility called Adobe Life Cycle Designer. It also includes some useful form templates such as conference registration, employee appraisal, etc.

When using forms created in other applications as the basis of an Acrobat form, you can now choose “Run Form Field Recognition” form the “Forms” menu and Acrobat will examine the layout of the form and create interactive form fields automatically.

You can also use a printed form as the basis for an interactive PDF form. Just choose the Scan From Paper option when creating your new form.

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.

The advanced menu in Acrobat 8 Professional contains a new feature (”Enable Usage Rights in Acrobat Reader”) which allows Acrobat Reader users to fill out your form and then save the form data. Normally, this can only be done with a full version of Acrobat Professional.

To send the form to group of recipients via email, just choose “Distribute Form” from the “Form” menu. A Microsoft Outlook address book can be used to generate a mailing list or you can just type or paste in a list of recipients.

Returned forms are saved in a special Acrobat file called a dataset. When users complete the form and email it back to you, you simply double-click on the attached form. Acrobat opens a special window marked ” Add Completed Form to Data Set”.

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.