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Submitting field data as cell data in a spreadsheet via email?

Forum Index > Forms: LiveCycle Designer > Submitting field data as cell data in a spreadsheet via email?
2008-10-15 15:15:03
cyanstudios
Registered: May 6 2008
Posts: 81

I'm developing a form that people that can use to fill out their time worked. Afterward, I would like for this livecycle form's field data to be submitted as a spreadsheet, particularly a .dif file.

The reason for this is:
Our accounting software can import .dif spreadsheet files. But these spreadsheet files have to be configured in a specific way.

How can I best go about this?

I would not even mind writing this database using .php or something, and then linking the employees to a .dif file written to the website server.

Thoughts?

My Product Information:
LiveCycle Designer
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2008-10-20 15:54:48
#1
pdftrainer
Expert
Registered: Dec 14 2005
Posts: 180
Acrobat 8 introduced great data collection features. I would give that a try to collect the data. See the Collecting and managing form data and Compile form data topics in help for details.

You can open the compiled data in Excel and export as a DIF.

Good luck!

A certified expert on Adobe Acrobat, Carl Young is an Adobe Acrobat and LiveCycle Designer trainer and consultant based in Phoenix. He is the producer of the [link=http://www.pdfconference.com/]PDF Conference[/link].

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2008-10-21 06:25:32
#2
cyanstudios
Registered: May 6 2008
Posts: 81
Thank you for your response. For some reason, I thought I only posted once on this forum and once on the official Adobe forums, but I think I made a mistake. Here's another topic I have going that outlines a stumbling block to this solution.

http://www.acrobatusers.com/forums/aucbb/viewtopic.php?id=16540
Perhaps you'll want to respond there to what I say here
"Right now, what I'm dealing with is an accounting system. Field workers are expected to open a .PDF timesheet form that they can enter a number of hours worked and the values all eventually get emailed to our accounting department in a format that just imports into their software.
Elimination of input is key.

There are two options for import:
.DIF files that are spreadsheet based, so they can be made in excel and specific cells determine specific values
or
.TXT that recognizes each field of information based on the "column", or how the values are sequenced in a string.

I'm close to making this work with the .txt string, but we would also like to populate some fields on the .pdf via spreadsheets and perhaps an sql connection.

The .PDF itself resides on the website server, which is hosted on Linux, so I would like just at least a quick steer in the right direction on how to handle this. It seems a lot of these methods are relying on ODBC.

I'm sorry if I sound like I'm getting ahead of myself, but I plan to master this stuff and I have to start somewhere."

Thank you again.
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