Forum Moderators: phranque
Within the CS2 package resides Adobe Acrobat Professional. I've used Acrobat for years as I'm sure many of you have too. It is pretty much the standard in sharing documents for a variety of purposes.
With Acrobat 7, there are now PDF Forms available. Some of you may be saying "so, big deal, PDF makes forms". But, there is much more to it than that.
Adobe Designer is an application that comes with Adobe Acrobat Professional for Windows and can also be purchased separately. Designer lets you lay out a form from scratch, use a form template, or create a fillable and interactive form based on a nonfillable form. More advanced features in Designer let you use scripting objects, integrate a form with a data source, and create dynamic forms. Users can fill in a PDF form created with Adobe Designer if they have Adobe Acrobat Standard 7.0, Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0, or Adobe Reader 7.0.
I'm testing a couple of different forms right now and the features that are available are absolutely incredible. You know all those long complex web forms some of us create? Well, Acrobat makes that a breeze. You know all those database routines we set up to capture the data from the forms? Well, Acrobat makes that a breeze.
I'm just now touching the surface of the features that are available. The program that creates the forms is called Adobe Designer. It of course integrates with Acrobat to create a seamless environment in which you can manage all sorts of forms.
Another reason I bring this up is because this will be the true beginning of a paperless office. With Adobe PDF Forms, you no longer need to store paper documents, nada! We have a client right now where we are converting over 150 paper forms to the new PDF Forms. The cost savings that they just realized is immense both short term and long term.
Anyone else out there unleashed the power of PDF Forms yet?
P.S. Beginning web designers may opt to use a PDF form in place of a web form. I can see where this would save someone a lot of time and frustration if they were new to developing forms. The only requirement for using the forms is that you have Adobe Reader 7.0+.
It took me about 10 minutes to modify the template, add a few brand images, and modify the survey text. I also set up an email recipient for the survey results.
I sent the resulting PDF Form to a list of 5 test users. They've all completed the survey and have submitted their information.
Here's how simple it is...
Bam! All done. Now that data can be further interpolated by the client for their internal purposes.
P.S. All this functions under Adobe Acrobat 7. For form functionality to work, the user must have Adobe Reader 7 installed.
P.S.S. The next phase is to test the database functionality. If everything performs based on what I've seen so far, this is the answer to all those form headaches we run into. ;)
