Extended Forms Features
by Ted Padova
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In my last article, I talked about enabling PDF documents for Adobe Reader users for form data saving and digital signatures. In this article I’m going to discuss four new features that also rank high on my top ten list of Acrobat 8 features: Running form field recognition, flattening form fields, distributing and compiling forms, and aggregating data. I’ve put all four features into a category I’m calling Extended Forms Features.
Run Form Field Recognition
The first of my favorite new features for forms authors is the new menu command in Acrobat 8 that lets you turn a document created from almost any program export to PDF into a fillable form. Like enabling PDFs for Adobe Reader users, it’s just a matter of selecting a menu command and Acrobat 8 Professional magically creates form fields on the fly.
Open a PDF converted from any Microsoft Office, Adobe InDesign, or Adobe Illustrator document, a text file, or any other file that clearly displays form fields. These field indicators may be boxes, lines, or similar graphic objects that make the document look like a form. Select Forms > Run Form Field Recognition and Acrobat automatically creates form fields for you. It’s not perfect and sometimes it may miss a few fields (for example, the state fields and checkboxes in Figure 1); however, Acrobat does a pretty good job. It sure beats having to create the form from scratch.
Figure 1
What about scanned forms and Adobe Photoshop files? Acrobat says “sure.” Just use the Recognize Text Using OCR to convert a TIFF or other image format opened in Acrobat and then run the form field recognition command. You can populate just about any kind of PDF document with form fields as long as the appearance of the document looks like a form.
Flattening Form Fields
This feature may not rank very high on many people’s lists of favorite new features, but my pals Leonard Rosenthol and Duff Johnson (both of whom host blogs on Acrobatusers.com) are pleased to know I won’t be telling people to refry PDFs anymore at conferences.
Form fields add a lot of overhead to your PDFs and when you need to host files on the web or exchange files via email, you want to trim the file sizes as much as possible. When a form no longer needs fields and you want to distribute information contained in the data fields, you can delete all the fields while stamping down the data on a form.
To eliminate the fields and keep the data, open the PDF Optimizer. Click Discard Objects in the left pane and check the box for Flatten Form Fields as shown in Figure 2. When you save the document from the PDF Optimizer, your data stays while the fields are tossed. This significantly reduces the file size.
Figure 2
Distribute Form and Compile Returned Forms
The new Distribute Form menu command is also found in the Forms menu. This command lets you send a PDF form to a number of recipients, so they can complete the form and send it back to you. When you select Forms > Distribute Form a wizard window opens that walks you through the distribution process. This wizard is similar to setting up a comment review. When the form is distributed, it is also enabled with Reader usage rights so Adobe Reader users can participate in the form completion as well.
What’s neat about the forms you distribute is not the mechanism for distributing the form, but the way you can collect the data. Recipients return a form to you populated with data via an email attachment. Just like working in a comment review, you double click the file attachment, identify the data set you created when you distributed the form, and the recipient form is added to the data set in the form of a PDF Package. As more recipients return forms, the PDF Package is appended to add the additional forms as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3
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The Forms > Compile Returned Forms command is like an extension of the Distribute Forms command. When forms are returned to you via email, you double click the email file attachment and the form is appended to your data set. If you acquire a form from a network server, from a Flash drive or other external media, then you need a way to add the form to your PDF Package. Compile Returned Forms does just that. Select the menu command and the Compile Data dialog box opens. You click a Browse button to find your data set and click the Add File button to add additional files to the PDF Package.
Aggregating Data
From the PDF Package you can export data from multiple forms into a single Microsoft Excel worksheet. Notice in Figure 3 the Export Data button at the top of the list of files in the PDF Package. Click Export Data and a dialog box opens permitting you to save the forms data. From the Save as type (Windows) or Format (Macintosh) pull-down menu you can choose to save the data as CSV or XML. Select CSV and you can open the file directly in Microsoft Excel. When you open the file in Excel, each form will appear as a separate record with all fields shown in a row according to the respective record.
PDF Packages is certainly an exciting new feature and ranks high up on my top ten list of Acrobat 8 features. But we’ve only scratched the surface in this article. Come back next week when I talk about my 6th and 7th top rated features in Acrobat 8: Combining Files and creating PDF Packages.
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