First, I aplogize if this is basic info that a simple search might quickly reveal the answer ... I did search, but perhaps not well.
Anywho, I am a resident Psychiatrist that has been given the duty of streamlining the department's documentation. There are two basic documents that we deal with a great deal, one being a consultation sheet (with carbon copy), and the other a 7 page history and physical sheet. We must have hard copies of both documents. Both can be extremely time consuming to fill out, and there are many occasions when one document is filled out, and we discover that the other form needs to be filled out with roughly the same information. We have been handwriting these up till now, but I have spent my spare time over the last months creating PDF forms of both documents.
What I would like to be able to do is, either automatically or via a button, clone the information in select fields into the appropriate fields in the other document. I would like to keep the documents separate, but this is not essential. Cutting and pasting would defeat the purpose, as there are many, many fields.
Not to comlicate the issue, but two other documents could potentially be involved, with separate information needing to go to each.
Frankly, I don't even know if I should be working in Acrobat or LiveCycle Designer :(
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, even if it only points to another post or to a good, free resource on the net.
Thanks,
Noah
Nice project for you. If your forms are all "information" forms ( text fields) with no calculations or special validation, etc. then AcroForms created in Acrobat should work well. Some reasons for choosing to do the form in LiveCycle Designer include if you need dynamic features (growable and/or flowable elements) or a backend database for storing the information on the forms. If you design forms for a living it is supposed to be a better design tool also.
If combining the forms into one PDF would work for you then your duplicate input problem is easily solvable. Any field with the same name (exact and case sensitive) in a single PDF will automatically be populated once one of the fields with that name is filled in. So if you have first name, last name, weight, age, etc on different pages you would not need to re-enter it.
There is no easy way to do this if you have the PDFs as separate files. If the files need to be stored separately after filling and saving, you could add splitting or extracting as part of the workflow after they are filled out. You can add bookmarks for each form in the set and have those shown in the bookmarks panel to make navigating to the appropriate form easier for the person completing them.
Hope this helps,
Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.pdfscripting.com
www.windjack.com
Dimitri Munkirs
WindJack Solutions
pdfscripting.com