PDF Fill

Video instructions - PDF Fill

Instructions and Help about PDF fill

One of the most powerful and most popular features of Acrobat is its ability to create interactive forms to collect data no other program makes it this easy to create and distribute forms for any purpose in this chapter we'll explore how to build forms properly and then distribute them both by email as well as via Acrobat comm then we'll learn how to collect the responses and analyze them in Acrobat as well as in other programs like Microsoft Excel nobody likes to fill out forms and worse than filling out a form is trying to figure out what somebody else wrote in the form in the first place then there's the matter of dealing with the actual data how do you use it how do you get it into your data workflow turning flat paper forms into digital fillable forms can save hours of time and thousands of dollars of cost managing manually entered data that's why it's so amazing that Acrobat gives you the forms wizard a tool that can convert a normal flat form into a fillable PDF form almost instantly if your form was created on a computer and you still have the original file you're a step ahead of the game and it doesn't even matter what program created the form in the first place the base form can be created in almost any program that can export or print to the PDF format the samples used in this lesson were built in Word 2010 and Adobe InDesign cs5 no special features were used in creating the forms they're basically just words and lines exported to the PDF format but before you start working to create a new form layout you should know that acrobats form wizard doesn't treat every form design equally to demonstrate what I mean I built the same form for different ways we'll open each one in Acrobat and run them through the forms wizard to see how it deals with the differences open the file form design one dot PDF from the chapter 6 folder here's a basic form you've probably seen a million of them it's an application to join a mailing list it contains lines for the user to enter text information like their name and address as well as questions that you can answer with a check mark or an X notice how one question is either a yes or no answer and the other allows you to choose one or both options at the moment the form is static it doesn't allow you to enter any information on the screen using the text selection tool or the grabber hand to fill out this form you'd have to print it out first and then fill it out manually with a pencil or pen to turn this static form into a fillable form click tools open the forms panel and click create the form wizard will then walk you through the steps to convert the form.