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PDF Diary: The 15-minute online form. By Simon Hurst

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8th May 2006
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I mentioned on the opening page of my Adobe diary that one of the first things I had done with Acrobat Professional was to create an online order form for my website.

I had already created a form in Microsoft Word designed to be printed and filled in manually. The Word form was quite simple: it included two tables ' one designed to allow for entry of name and address details, and the other with a couple of tick boxes for the user to select the product or products they wanted to buy. I needed to include this form on my website, but rather than force potential clients to print it out, complete it and post it back, I wanted to provide the option to complete it online, and to submit the data electronically.

I immediately thought about looking at Acrobat to see how easy it would be to create my online form as a PDF document. The initial problem was deciding which of Adobe's form tools to use. As I was after a "quick and dirty" solution and already had the form I wanted designed in Word, I checked out the form tools available via the Advanced Editing option under the Tools menu.

It took a few minutes experimentation to work out how to create an online version of the form. First I used the Convert to Adobe PDF option from the Adobe PDF menu that Acrobat installs into Word to convert the original form.

Now I had a PDF document with blank spaces for the user to fill their details in. I needed to overlay half a dozen text fields from the Advanced Editing tools list onto the appropriate spaces. In fact, the easiest way to do this turned out to be to add a single text field, and then use the Create multiple copies option from the field's right click menu. Then I added the check boxes I needed.

The most impressive bit came next: this was the Submit by email button. Having again used the Advanced Editing tools to add a button, right-clicking on it gives access to the button's properties which include various actions. One of these actions lets you set a "mailto:" address to allow the user to submit the form data to you by email. After setting the button up and some fiddling around with field names and the field order, I was able to put the form on my website and start anticipating the resultant flood of orders.

With regard to the flood of orders, one of the other excellent facilities within Acrobat is the Form Data-Create Spreadsheet from Data Files option in the File menu. This ensures that, as the orders start pouring in, it's very easy to collate them all into an Excel spreadsheet for processing.

I was feeling quite pleased with myself having worked out how to do all of this. But when I recounted my new-found expertise to the Adobe experts, my triumph was greeted by a polite cough and the suggestion that I look more closely at newer form design features within Acrobat's dedicated forms design tool, Adobe Designer.

It seems that the Designer is the best option for long term forms that you want to use again, but the older Advanced Editor is a useful option if you just want to create quick, one-use forms like my web order. For my next experiement, I'm going to use the Designer to create an electronic form from scratch. I'll let you know how I get on in my next post.

Simon Hurst from The Knowledge Base specialises in training and consultancy for accountants and other professionals. For the PDF and Acrobat Zone, he is keeping a record of his experiences with Acrobat. For more background, see his previous diary entries:

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