I am trying out Acrobat Pro for 30 days to see if I can perform a task that is done outside our company.
The scenerio:
Our company provides company A with a excel spreadsheet with employee data (15 columns with 1500 employees (1500 rows). They take the information and create a separate pdf file for each employee with the same information on it but in a format thats more appealing.
I have downloaded and have installed Acrobat pro and started using Lifecycle Designer. I seem to be able to mock up the basic text of the form that is consistent for each employee including graphics that we own.
Question:
How can I take our spreadsheet and import the information so that we can produce the same pdf form for each employee? The information on the spreadsheet is text and does not need to calculated. I thought there may be a utility to import from an excel file. Is this the case or do I need create a different file format (CSV? etc.).
My second question is: What do I use for fields to map out the text I will be importing knowing that its just text? Would it be the text object or the text field object?
Thank you
Peter
There are two form technologies built into Acrobat, AcroForms and LiveCycle Forms. Each of these has a different way of importing data from an Excel spread sheet. And both can be automated, although this is not a trivial task. You need to have some programming skills.
But there are some easy things you can check out to see what can be done. Since you are already using LiveCycle, that is where you should start. First you'll need to enable the Excel file for hooking up to a DB driver. You do this by selecting all the data, including the colum names, on a single work sheet and selecting the "Insert > Name > Define" menu item. Then enter a name. This essentially creates a DB table name for the spreadsheet. Next you need to hook the Excel spread sheet up to ODBC. Once this is done you can hook the spread sheet up to the form through the Data Connection tab in LiveCycle Designer, and then bind the form fields to columns in the spread sheet. Then, with a little code on a button you can walk through each record (or Line) in the spreadsheet.This really is an advanced form development task. But you can find documentation on each step I've described, and there are some turorials, articles, and forum threads on this site that are relavant.
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]
Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
www.pdfscripting.com
Very Important - How to Debug Your Script