using exel to merge data and emailing the form

Yes, this is entirely possible to do with Acrobat JavaScript. I've actually written a custom application for doing something very similar. However, for 10k entries I wouldn't suggest doing it in Acrobat JS. Or at least not all of it. So building a custom mail merge application isn't terribly difficult, but it is a bit expensive. If you can find an existing application you might be better off.

Mail merge applications are very popular and it wouldn't supprise me if something like this already existed. I've done some searching on the web and while I found lots of mail merge applications, none of them seemed to email PDF form attachments. Many of them used PDF as a template, but flattened the form fields before sending.

The closest one that I found was from www.evermap.com. It may in fact do exactly what you want but it's hard to tell from the description.

Have you looked at the mail merge in Outlook?

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php[/url]

Then most important JavaScript Development tool in Acrobat
[url=http://www.pdfscripting.com/public/34.cfm#JSIntro][b]The Console Window (Video tutorial)[/b][/url]
[url=http://www.acrobatusers.com/tutorials/2006/javascript_console][b]The Console Window(article)[/b][/url]

Thanks, Tom, for the reply.

Instead of buying an application, are there any features in Adobe Professional that will help me accomplish what I am trying to do?

I had the idea of creating a generic fillable PDF form and emailing it out to our 10k + members instead of creating 10k+ emails that contain unique member information sent to 10k+ unique email addresses.

Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Yes, you can create a single form and email it out to 10k members. But this is not really a task for Acrobat. Acrobat is a PDF document finishing tool that has some minor document workflow processing capabilities. So with a little code and some tweaking Acrobat can be used as a variable data print or email application. But 10k items is way outside it's scope. This is a job for a specialized server application, not Acrobat.

To just send out an unfilled form to lots of people you should use an email application since it's an email job. For example, www.AWeber.com is a mass email application or you could probably use Outlook for this as well.


Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php[/url]

Then most important JavaScript Development tool in Acrobat
[url=http://www.pdfscripting.com/public/34.cfm#JSIntro][b]The Console Window (Video tutorial)[/b][/url]
[url=http://www.acrobatusers.com/tutorials/2006/javascript_console][b]The Console Window(article)[/b][/url]