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.
One of the main advantages of using PDF forms, as against, web-based forms is that the PDF will always look the same regardless of which operating system or web browser is being used.
One also has a wider variety of options when it comes to distributing PDF forms: for example, email, CD or DVD. Email, in particular offers a very direct distribution channel.
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.
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 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.
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.
Traditionally, only a full version of Acrobat would allow you to fill out a PDF form and then save the form data to disk. With Acrobat 8 professional, if you click on the “Advanced” menu and choose “Enable Usage Rights in Acrobat Reader”, people filling out your form with Acrobat Reader will be able to save their form data and email it back to you.
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.
Once all the forms have been returned and the data added to the dataset, you just open the dataset and export it as a CSV (comma separated values) file. This format is compatible with programs like Excel and Access which can then be used to store and analyse responses to your forms.
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