Design Center article

Form data can be easily aggregated and stored using the form management process in Adobe® Acrobat® 8. Completed forms are returned via e-mail, and manually saved in a storage folder.

Requirements

To complete this article, you will need the following software:

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge:

Basic knowledge of working with forms in Acrobat

Handling form data

As described in “Distributing and tracking a form with Acrobat 8”, a dataset file is created automatically as part of the form distribution process. The file is a PDF Package.

To add files to a dataset file, follow these steps:

1. Double-click a returned form to open it in Acrobat 8 Professional. The Add Completed Form to Dataset dialog opens, listing the dataset PDF file created as part of the distribution on the dialog.
2. Click OK to close the dialog. The PDF Package file opens, and the form is included in its data list. The structure of the PDF Package includes data-specific commands (Figure 2).

    

   

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   Figure 1: The form files are added to the PDF Package dataset file.

3. To add more files to the dataset as they arrive, click Import Data on the PDF Package’s toolbar to open the Add Returned Forms dialog.

   Click Add File to locate and select the completed form files, which are listed in the Add Returned Forms dialog. Click OK to close the dialog and load the files into the PDF Package, shown in Figure 1.

4. To export the data to a spreadsheet program, click Export Data on the PDF Package’s toolbar. The Select Folder to Save File dialog opens, using the dataset filename as the default, and saving in the CSV (comma-separated values) format. Click Save.
5. Open your spreadsheet program, and locate and select the CSV file. The spreadsheet lists the returned forms by filename, as well as the results for each of the two questions (Figure 2).

    

   

   Figure 2: The exported form data is shown in a spreadsheet, with the results for each question listed in separate columns.

Once a day? Once a week?

How often you choose to assemble files in the PDF Package depends on your workflow and project schedule. You may need to aggregate files daily, or only at the end of a return period.

Where to go from here

For more information about working with forms in Acrobat 8, check out these other great tutorials:

• Drawing a multistate button with Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker
• Distributing and tracking a form with Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker
• Configuring form fields with Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker

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