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by: AndrewWhiteman
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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.

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.

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.

Once you have the basic form created, you can add in all the standard form controls. In addition to text fields, PDF forms support combo boxes, option buttons, checkboxes and, of course, submit buttons.

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.

Completed forms are emailed back to you when the user clicks on the submit button. When you open each returned form Acrobat prompts you to add it to what is termed a dataset, a repository of form data.

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.

About the Author

The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Acrobat Classes in London and throughout the UK.

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