I'm New & Frustrated

1. It depends. In general, the learning curve for Acrobat forms is less steep than Designer forms. Your needs should dictate which one you choose. You can implement many types of forms equally well in both, but others might lead you to choose one over the other.

2. Printing capabilities are pretty much equivalent, and you need to provide more information about what you mean by "sorting information".

When you say "the option of printing certain parts on demand", do you mean certain pages? Is printing the main form of output, or will you ever need to extract data from the form or populate the form with data from a database? The more details you can provide on what your needs are, the better folks here can direct you.

George

George:

Thanks so much for the reply.

Let me be more specific, if I can:

An admissions person fills out the form. That form then feeds multiple departments. Ideally, a person in department A should be able to print on demand what he or she needs without printing everything else.

None of this information is pushed to a database.

I hope this helps - and again, thank you very much for your help. Bascially, I know I'm in the right place to do this, but I need some help focusing my needs to ensure I use the right tool to do the work.

RichardKue

Richard,

You need to answer some questions:

1. So you have a 22 page form, and say "department A should be able to print what he or she needs without printing everything else. Does this mean that a user should be able to print only certain pages of the 22 page form, or something else?

2. What did you mean by "sorting information". What are your needs here?

3. It sounds like the filled-in form will be sent to the other departments electronically, as opposed to as a paper printout. Is this correct?

George

George:

I'm not sure what I want anymore - nor do I necessarily know how to explain it - hence my frustration as a new user. I think I'll just start with Acrobat and push forward and if I get to a point where I cannot answer a question, I'll post it on this forum.

All I do know is that the organization I'm working with is sick and tired of handwriting the 22 pages of information and constantly re-entering the same vital information over and over again. And then I know there are departments that need info from this document - sections/pages/boxes - whatever - and would like to print those without everything else.

Nothing is sent to a database - the organization is very concerned about privacy and would like to avoid spreading information around too easily. The organization still maintains a paper file on their clients because it's easier for them - but the admissions folks - those who must fill out the 22 page form - they're the ones who are tired and want an electronic document to make their jobs easier.

Thanks again for your help George.

Richard

OK, that's probably a good idea. Create the form document (in a word processor, InDesign, whatever), convert it to PDF using Acrobat, and use Acrobat (not Designer) to add the form fields. This will be the easiest approach and should be sufficient for your needs.

Good luck,

George

I can tell you that we also type 22 page documents in our healthcare facility and I think the best thing is to have it sent to a database. I do this now with Infopath since it has a submit feature and a lookup data feature. I'm trying to figure out how to do this in Acrobat now.

We submit the data because our intake department makes mistakes so when the quality assurance dept. finds it, they can look it up fix it and print it out again.

Like I said I do this with infopath but infopath is a headache to deal with but if I can type in a patient's name, or ID# to do a search in a PDF form that would be cool.