Need an idiot guide to creating a form with expandable text

Select the "Text-Field" tool and draw the text filed on the page.
When the "Text Field Properties" Window appears click the "Options" tab
Check the box "Multi-line"
Check the box "Scrolling long text"
Check the box "Allow Rich Text Formatting"

(I also like to check "Check Spelling")

NOTE: the scroll bar will only appear while the user is typing in the text field. When that field has lost focus a "+" will appear in the lower left of the area, indicating additional text. Clicking the area will reveal the scroll bars.

I hope this is what you were looking for!

This is not easy and it's taken me months.
If you want a field that actually expands to fit the text within it the above solution won't work.
You need to create a dynamic form with flowed and positioned content. You need to learn about subforms.
Look at the help screens for "Approaches to creating dynamic form designs"
and "Creating a form design in a positioned context" in particular.
When you open LiveCycle Designer, it should give you an option to do a tutorial. It is worth doing this. You learn a lot.
As for books - Adobe Acrobat Classroom in a Book has a chapter on Forms which is quite useful and lots of practise exercises. And they're always great books worth having.

Subforms and flowed text by sgfred
I just spotted the above post in the list. Check it out as well.

Good luck,
Cheers,
Marion

Thanks. I think I figured it out. I bought Classroom in a Book too.

But I don't see the option to do a tutorial when I open LiveCycle. In fact, I don't seem to be able to just open LiveCycle without first bringing up a document and then editing it.

LiveCycle should list as a separate program in your All Programs list. Send it to the desktop as a shortcut and then you can open it without having to go through Acrobat first. If you double-click on a pdf, it will automatically open in Acrobat. But if you open LiveCycle Designer and then do a File=>Open, your form will go into Designer. If you don't get the introduction screen offering the tutorial, go to Help => Getting Started. That's got the tutorials there.
Cheers, Marion

You said you also like to check "Check Spelling"...where is this? Does this enable spell check while the form user is typing? If so I NEED TO KNOW!!! =) Thank you!

Alternatively you can auto re-size the font in your text field using the following tip:
http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobatineducation/2006/03/

That's a cute trick but isn't that an accessibility issue?

In terms of creating an expanding field Marion has the best answer as it applies to Designer rather than Acrobat. You will need to use subforms otherwise your expanded field may overlap the content beneath it.

The best example is the comments section of the Purchase Order form. You can access this by opening Designer and then choosing the explore sample forms option.

In terms of books the only one available specifically for Designer is 'Creating Dynamic Forms with LiveCycle Designer' by J.P Terry.

For example, you have a field that needs to expand but it is part of a section that you want to move down to include this expanded field.

You need to create three subforms and then wrap all of them in another subform ensuring that your parent subform is set to flow content.

e.g

parent (flow with allow page breaks within content ticked)
subform1 (position)
field1
field2
subform2 (flow with page breaks)
field3 (expanded)
subform3 (position)
field4

Ensure that the form is saved as dynamic. Hopefully this will work for you.

My solution to this was to shrink the text in the text field it was filled with text.

I did this by changing the font size to 0 and making sure that "multi-line" was selected.

Hope this helps!

I just saw this in another post.

http://forms.stefcameron.com/2006/10/31/expanding-to-fit-the-entire-value/

:)