Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional can be used, among many other things, for creating and distributing interactive forms and keeping track of peoples’ responses as they are sent back to the form’s originator.
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.
The ability to create forms has long been a feature of Adobe Acrobat. However, Acrobat 8 Professional takes form creation to a new level in terms of ease and sophistication.
Acrobat has traditionally been a “magpie” application, relying on other applications to create all of its content. Now, however, forms can be created in Acrobat based on a wide variety of pre-created templates: invoices, timesheet, expenses etc.
As before, you can use forms made in other software such as Word or QuarkXPress. However, now Acrobat has a feature for automatically recognising where fields need to be inserted and creating them for you.
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.
As well as having Acrobat automatically generate text fields for you, you can add a variety of other controls, such as drop-down menus, tick boxes and radio buttons. Then you finish it off by adding 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.
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”.
To complete your project, after you have received back all the forms you distributed, you simply open the Acrobat dataset and click on the export button to save it as a .csv file. You can then import this file into Microsoft Excel or Access for storage and/or analysis.