Adobe In An Hour: Adobe Acrobat DC - Forms | Jeremiah Baumann | Skillshare
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Adobe In An Hour: Adobe Acrobat DC - Forms

teacher avatar Jeremiah Baumann, Let's learn together!

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:26

    • 2.

      Your Assignment

      0:59

    • 3.

      The Importance of Assessment

      1:53

    • 4.

      Review The Basics

      7:27

    • 5.

      Creating A Form

      4:05

    • 6.

      Customizing Your Form

      7:19

    • 7.

      Field Properties

      9:15

    • 8.

      Form Calculations

      5:28

    • 9.

      Action Buttons

      3:20

    • 10.

      Sending and Collecting Data

      6:36

    • 11.

      Conclusion

      0:50

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About This Class

You’re probably aware of PDF documents and Adobe Acrobat software. However, what about interactive forms? Ever wanted to create a digital survey? What about a PDF that your customers/clients can fill in? In this course, you’ll learn:

  1. The basics of creating forms in Adobe Acrobat DC (2018)
  2. How to use advanced field properties and buttons to create an interactive document
  3. How to utilize Adobe Acrobat DC to collect forms and analyze your data

This class is for anyone who wants to further their use of Adobe Acrobat to create universal and interactive documents. As an Adobe Certified Expert in Acrobat, my goal is to help you develop your comfort and skills with the software.

For this class you will need access to Adobe Acrobat DC, which is a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. You can download a trial of the software from www.adobe.com.

Meet Your Teacher

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Jeremiah Baumann

Let's learn together!

Teacher

Hello, I'm Jeremiah Baumann. I'm an experienced university instructor teaching business and digital media courses and also an experienced director of marketing and communications. I'm here to share with you some great business advice, technology training (ranging from Adobe, Apple, and gadgets), marketing and communications, podcasting, photography and more.

See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to the Mastering Forms in Adobe Acrobat DC. My name's Jeremiah Baumann, the Creative Technologist. Today, I'm going to make this process as simple as possible for you to be able to turn normal documents and PDFs into unbelievably helpful interactive online forms. As an Adobe Certified Expert, my goal is to make this easy and painless as possible for you. This tool will allow you to be able to create interactive forms making it easy for your users to submit this data to you. During this course, we'll be covering creating the actual forms, advanced properties of each of the form components, action buttons, so that you can have automated printing, clearing, and editing of these files, and even a way to collect this data and analyze it for future use. What you're going to need for this class is a working computer. The most up to date version of Adobe Acrobat DC which, don't worry if you don't have a copy, you can download one for free as a free trial from adobe.com, and some survey that you want to digitalize. If you don't have a survey in mind, don't worry, I've provided one that you can download from Skillshare and follow along with the course. I think that this skill set is extremely important for entrepreneurs, anybody working in business already, or if you just want to save the hours of time working with surveys and paper formats, and want to bring it into the digital world. So let's get started. 2. Your Assignment: Your assignment for this course is to follow along and create an interactive forum in Adobe Acrobat DC. I've provided a file for you to follow along, and you can feel free to do this as you watch through the course, or after you complete all the videos going back and doing the project. Ultimately, if you'd like to use your own survey or you have a document you'd rather use, you can do that as well. What we want you to do is, encourage everybody to post these to the community, so that way, not only can I see them, but the community itself will be able to see all the creative and useful ways people are using Adobe Acrobat DC for their personal and business needs. Ultimately, the assignment should only take you about an hour to two hours, but that all depends on your comfort with Adobe Acrobat DC already, if you've done the research and know what questions you want to ask, and if you have an idea of where you want to get started and what your end goals are. Either way, it should be a great assignment, and I can't wait to see all of your work. 3. The Importance of Assessment: I wanted to take this time to just talk about assessment in terms of business. As a business and marketing instructor at the college level, this is something I discuss with my students a lot of the time. You can have a lot of great campaigns, you can do a great job in your business, no matter what it is, but you should always be doing some form of assessment to get feedback from your clients or customers, to make sure you're providing the best service possible. Assessment can be a little overwhelming especially when you look at all the data points, have to organize it, and then translate that into what does this actually mean. The nice thing is that, Adobe Acrobat DC makes it very easy for you to create these forms, distribute them whether they're paper forms, as a digital form, or even emailed out to your clients, and taken back in for data analysis. The cool thing with the software is that it's easy to use. I can't stress that enough. A lot of great services out there allow you to do online surveys as well. But there's just something to being able to have complete creative control and making sure that your clients understand your brand truly through your final survey. So do focus on assessment, take some time before even get started with this course, to really think about what type of questions do I want to ask? Is it a performance review? Is it or as the brand or the company overall? Is it a specific service? Or you just looking for future feedback for advancement of your company? Take the time, really dive into these questions. Because the more pre-planning you do, the easier it will be to create your form. If you know ahead of time the questions and even the responses that you're looking for, you'll be able to fly through this in no time. So again, can't stress this enough. Assessment is key for all businesses and make sure that you do spend a lot of time pre-planning and then we can jump right into Adobe Acrobat and get your set up. 4. Review The Basics: I wanted to start off just reviewing some of the basics of Adobe Acrobat DC. Now realize that, for this course, there is that level of expectation that you've used Adobe Acrobat in some way, shape, or form. Honestly, if you've used Adobe Reader, you're probably okay. But let's just get re-familiarized with Adobe Acrobat DC, the layout of the tools that you're going to be using, and just some of that basic knowledge, so you're comfortable to get started. Hey everybody. So what I wanted to start with was an introduction to Acrobat DC, just covering the basics in case. Maybe it's been a while since you've used the software. Maybe you've gone through different versions, but ultimately you should have some experience in using Adobe Acrobat already. Let's just cover some of the basics here. So, when looking at Acrobat with no files open, it looks very simplistic. It looks very broken down. You have all the recent files list spot here. They're promoting actually their free app which is Adobe Scan. A very cool mobile tool to allow you to use your camera on your mobile device to basically scan anything and turn it into a PDF. Highly recommended. If you haven't downloaded that, just to give that a try. It can be a really convenient tool especially if you're on the go, if you travel, if you need it to scan any receipts. So, definitely take a look into that. But where you see all the power with inside Adobe Acrobat is by selecting tools in the upper-left hand corner. By doing that, you actually get a list on the right-hand side and in the main screen. What you'll notice with Adobe a lot of the time, they present tools and options in multiple forms. So, you'll be able to click on an icon. You'll be able to click on a menu item. Then, in this case, you also have the right-hand menu to choose from. So, they're all the same tools. They just want to make it convenient as possible for you to be able to go in and click what you need. Now, when looking at these tools, they are broken up into a couple of different categories. So, we have create and editing tools, review and approval tools, forms and signatures, protect and standardize, and customize. So, lot of different options here, but just running through some of the basics. You have 'creating a PDF.' You can actually start with a blank document here, and create a single PDF document. Lot of the time they want you to scan and grab something to start with, just as some starting option. You can merge multiple files together combining them creating a PDF portfolio, which actually organizes different types of files together which we'll talk about that a little bit later in the course. You can grab a screenshot actually with Adobe Acrobat. Most people don't know that. Scanner. So using an actual scanning tool to be able to scan in the document. On Web page, you can actually grab a URL of a website and turn it into a PDF. Clipboard. So anything that you have on your clipboard that you copied and pasted from another document. The odd one where most people don't think of which is starting with a blank page. So when you do this, you actually have a white document just like you would in Word, but using the tools of Adobe Acrobat to get started. So, an interesting spot. Most people don't go that route to start working with a document but realize that that's still an option if you'd like to build everything natively in the application. So, I'm going to click background tools at the upper-left hand corner. Combining files. Obviously, allowing you to take multiple PDFs, select different pages from them and combine them into one. Organize pages allows you to actually move pages around, delete single pages in a document, and just re-categorize, move things the way that you want them to. This is a great option if you're going to take maybe a couple large PDFs and merge them together. If you have extra pages in there, you want to cut out. It just gives you some great options. Editing a PDF. Pretty straightforward. Exporting. Enhancing scans. Both of those, pretty straightforward, allowing you to export as a different document type, allowing you to scan in different document types. Then, rich media, which is actually putting in audio, video, and interactive objects into a PDF. This is a little more advanced. We're an uncommon, I guess I could say, that a lot of people don't use PDFs to build out full multimedia functions, but realize that there are some of those things there. So, what I've done is I've pulled up a basic form that you probably are all familiar with or at least hopefully you are. A tax form. 1080 Individual Income Tax form for the United States. The nice thing is that the IRS actually provides this document now as a workable PDF document. That means that you're actually able to go in here. You can get started, and basically start filling out the document as you would on paper if you're doing this by hand. Some of the benefits here are that you're able to type, so it will be nice and clean. You're going to be able to save and print this document which will cover a little bit later, and allow you to have this document that's organized and very easy to read. As you probably recognized, some forms have very small spaces for you to type or write information. So by going in and typing that information out, it just looks that much better. What you'll notice is a pattern in any PDF that's been prepared this way. There's blue color here. Any blue highlighted areas allow you to actually go in and start typing your response. They'll be a font choice and a size already chosen most of the time, but you can go in, and just start making these choices and making changes. What you can also do is a lot of these checkboxes are actually set up as checkboxes. So, where you would usually take a pen and either make a check or fill in the box or however it may be, you're going to go through and be able to do these all digitally in the space. You can type numbers in here which is great. It allows you to go back and edit. It allows you to make your choices, whatever it is, and as long as it's a blue space, you can click in and start typing. So, for putting in basic numbers, it's super effective, super easy, and allows you to stay organized. This form has most of these spaces completed for you already, so you're able just to go through as you normally would, and start entering your numbers. Plenty of checkboxes as well so you could go through, check things, uncheck things if you accidentally did that. Basically, it gives you a chance to review and edit without having to erase, cross out, white out. That's really the biggest benefit of using an Adobe Acrobat PDF is that you can take your time. You can do what you need to do. You can make edits, and you're not getting frustrated having to print out this form over and over. So, really the key thing to look at when you're doing anything with forms is it's going to be blue highlighted. It's going to be nice and easy and recognizable for you. You click in. You start typing, and you get started. So, nice and basic. We're going to take you into actually preparing this form now on a step further. 5. Creating A Form: Now that you remember how to use Adobe Acrobat DC, let's jump into creating your first form. Now, the nice thing is that Adobe has provided unbelievable easy to use form wizard, that'll get you started. Let's jump right in. Looking at forms and signatures, so were going to spend some time here later in the course specifically on filling and signing, preparing a form, sending for signature, all those have to do with actually getting documents prepared as forms and sending and signing for other people. Especially with the security signing that you're able to do with Adobe Acrobat. So, those we will touch on here shortly. Certificate's is a way to actually set up a true security certificate and validate authenticity when signing a document digitally. So, as more documents now can be signed digitally, this is a way that a Adobe created certification to verify that you actually are the one that signed that so, we'll touch on that later as well. So, we're going to start building the actual forms now. So, what I have here is a sample document that you can download to get started if you don't have your own document already. But feel free to follow along as this is the project part of the assignment part of the course. So, what I have here is a simple document that uses a quality service survey. This is a pretty standard looking document, just something I put together very generically. As you can see it asks for name, data visit, has some radio buttons, has them checkboxes, and a spot for comments and a signature. So, just a real simple server that probably would be handed out in person, maybe put in a bag or an envelope after somebody has left, depending on the situation. So to start creating these interactive forms, there's a really great feature built into Adobe Acrobat DC that basically allows you to use an automated wizard to start this process, and the wizard is pretty good. So, what I'm going to do is I've just opened the PDF, I'm going to go down, and I'm going to prepare for them. So I'm going to do this using the right hand menu option with the prepare form icon, and what it's going to ask is, how do you want to begin? Do you want to use a file or do you want to scan a file? Since I have the file already open, it's already selected, yes, that's what I want. This document requires signatures. You can check that box as well, it will look for signature forms automatically. Form field auto-detection is on. So what it's going to do is, it's going to look at my form and try and determine what type of fields even I want to put into this form. It's doing a lot of work here. I'm going to hit start and boom, instantly it's done already. What did it do? It found a good chunk of the fields. Sometimes it finds all of them, sometimes it doesn't find any. It really is determined by how you have your forms set up before you begin. Obviously, government documents that started off as paper forms basically, Adobe Acrobat can find all those very easily, and it finds a majority of them. Something like this that I had created in Microsoft Word, it's not sure so it's not going to put anything in that it's unsure about. But what it did is it grab your name, the data visit, the location, who did you work with, so an employee name, it did skip all of the radio buttons, the checkboxes, the comment box, but it did find the signature box. So, overall the wizard actually did a pretty good job going through, figuring out what I wanted to do, but there's definitely some gaps. I know I want to make some adjustments as well as the data visit is probably just set up as a basic text box, and I want to control that formatting a bit like we saw before with the EMS document. So, the wizard got me started but really now it's time to jump in and start doing some of the manual overhauling to make this form exactly what it needs to be. 6. Customizing Your Form: Now that you've used the wizard and there are still some gaps in your document, let's focus on customizing this forum for exactly what you want. This is really where the basics come in to play and you start doing some more advanced planning with your document. Let's take a look. Now, what you can see is there's some spots here that need, basically the radio buttons or the checkboxes applied. What you see at the top here is your manual selection of all different types of fields. You can do a basic text field. You're able to add checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdown lists. You can add a signature field. You can add a signature block. You're able to do initials. You're able to add title, company, name field, e-mail field, and the data field. So, by having all these things, you're able to basically build out this form just how you'd like to. You take the basic paper form and turn it 100 percent digital. I'm going to click on the radio button here and all I'm going to do is drag down and click right on top, a yes, and it's going to pop up asking me some questions here. So, it could ask the choice and the group name. Realize that there's only one button in this group. So, the group is going to be the title of basically the question. So, we're just going to put receptionist. Just to keep it simple. Choice one is going to be yes. We're going to add another button and that's going to be the No. Click again. Still has the same group name, and I'm going to select no as my option. Now, I have two digital radio buttons that people will be able to select from when completing this form online. I'm going to click over here on the right hand side of the preview button. Whenever you do this, it basically shows you what the form will look like when it goes live. So, as you can see, these blue fields here allow you to have that data input like we're used to. Then I can check yes or no, not both, using that question. So, clearly it's working exactly how we would like it to do. I'm going back to edit now, and go back into the edit mode. Notice that I've got some checkboxes here. So, I'm going to go up to the toolbar, select the checkbox, and again, drag my mouse down to these squares. Now, what I have here, field name. Who needs to sign this field? Which means, what kind of thing is it? Is it attached to a person? What actually are you doing? For this purpose, it's not being signed by anybody. It's just being checked to mark off the different service options. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually change this to service one as a checkbox. We'll get into some of the properties and a little deeper dive here in the next segment. I'm going to then create a checkbox for service two. I'm going to call this service two. I am going to create a checkbox for service three. I'm putting in here service three. Now, when I go back to preview, as you can see, I'm able to check each box on or off or all three if I would like in the survey form. Perfect for how I have it set up exactly what I wanted it to be. Going back into edit mode. I still have some other radio buttons here that I need to also get entered into the system. So, this now is service representatives. I'm going to change the group name. If you don't change the group name, then what's going to happen is you're only going to be able to select one radio button on the entire survey sheet. So, that's going to obviously be problematic as you have multiple questions here that have the radio buttons as a part of them. So, I'm just going to call this service rep because it's asking about that. Again, I've got a yes and I'm going to put in a no for the service rep group. Now, those are done. I'm going to skip this just for saving some time here, but obviously I would continue the process with the radio buttons for the rate your level of service satisfaction. What I want to cover now is this comment place. So, right now there's nothing here. The form wizard did not detect anything because it's just a header. So, I need to fill the space in. I'm going to go up and add a text field. Now, most text fields are basic. There's simplistic. It's just a single line of text. While here, I'm going to want multiple lines. So, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to actually grow this field out so it takes up more space within the form. I'm going to double-click on an open field properties. Again, we're going to get to this in the next segment, but I want to cover this right now because this seems to confuse a lot of people. When I'm doing this text box, name is going to be from text five to comments. It's going to be a field type of text. Here you can see I could change it to any of the other ones, but the thing that's really important here is looking at its appearance and looking at its position. When I'm dealing with appearance, I have a font size here of 12 and a font chosen already. When you're dealing with common spaces you know someone is going to continue to write a lot, it may be helpful to change the font size to auto. What that means is going to start off quite large, but if they type a lot of information, it will continue to shrink it down to make sure it all fits in the box. When I select position this is where it is physically on the page. Generally you can click and drag, but if you need it to be more precise you could use this and then options. How do I want the text to align? Do I want it left, center or right? Should I have check spelling on? Yes, always leave check spelling on. I can make this a multiple line document. I clicked that which means I'll be able to continue to put multiple lines of text and you're going to want to do this anytime you're looking for a lot of text to be filled. Scrolling long text is actually something you want to turn off. What scrolling text don't allow you to do is instead of filling up the box and running out of room, it will allow the person to continue to write outside of the box. However, if you have to actually print any of these forms, that will get cut off. So, for most of these surveys in case some people like to fill them out, print them and bring them in, it's not just digital. I like to take that one off of there. I'm going to hit close. Go back to preview and as you can see now, I can start typing whatever I want. I'm just going to put a bunch of letters in here, and it goes to multiple lines making it nice and easy for somebody to go and start filling data in. Again, I've got my checkboxes. I have my radio buttons, and I have my next signature spot that I could sign. I could just type in my name if I wanted to. I could use the signature tools which we already covered in Adobe Acrobat. Lots of different options here. So, creating forums is very simplistic. However, in the next segment, you're going to learn just how complicated you can make it, by how sophisticated you want your form to be. 7. Field Properties: No, you have your form together. We're going to take a look at the specific properties of a lot of the different attributes of your form. Adobe Acrobat DC allows you to really get in there and customize the expectation for these specific forms and allows you to really plan ahead for data collection and analysis later on once you get data flowing in. Let's dig in. So, as I mentioned we're going to look at a kind of deeper dive into what these form properties actually allow us to do because there is a lot of control you can have over a PDF form using these form properties. So, as you see we have the form still filled out like before, but what are you going to click on your name here, I'm going to be in edit mode and I'm just going to double click. You're going to get the field properties so similar to what we've looked at before. But basically you have some options on how you want to organize this. Thinking for down the road purposes, if you're going to be using the survey and actually collecting the data and analyzing the data all within Adobe Acrobat. You're going to want to be very intentional as to what you call your name fields. You know basically the wizard went in and said, "Okay. The title is your name. Is that we want to call the field name?" Basically your name isn't really great especially for analysis purposes so, maybe you'd want to put client name. Just to clarify. Now the tool tip is what actually shows up to help people fill out the form. This you'd still want to leave as your name. That way when they over to understand what they need to put in there. The field type as I mentioned before, you can go and select any of the field types those are the icons located at the top field bar. This when we do still want to keep with text. Generally speaking the wizard is able to figure out those pretty straightforward. Participant role- So, what you have the option here is if you wanted to build out a very complex document you could have multiple people's prepares, signers think kind maybe like a marriage or divorce paperwork where you'd have multiple parties involved, you could assign certain parties who can fill out what section. So, you can really lock that down, so, people don't actually fill out the wrong portion. Again you need a very sophisticated document at that point. So, if you leave it on anybody, basically whoever opens the form is able to fill that out. Signer's email- that's an option if you're again basically creating one of these specifically for one person. You can do a lot of prefilled information here. Common properties is the form field visible. So, certain form fills you can actually do invisible in here, if you're adding security, if you're adding different interactivity but without a visible component. You can make it read only which means that they're not able to fill anything in. You can click the checkbox for required which means they have to fill this part out. This is a good common practice for dealing with surveys at least a basic information. Now, by making their name required said they wanted to send in a survey anonymously, you wouldn't really want to do that. So, think about your assessment. Think about what your purposes and your goals are and try and follow the best practices that either you or your organization follow, or do some searching online, you can track that down. I'm going to uncheck required just for now. Back into the appearance tab we visited this briefly before you can actually setup a border and color. So, if you want to make this stand out, if you want it to be a box versus a line, you have the ability to do that. You can also set that font size to a specific size. I don't like to do that with names just because some people have very short names and some people have very long names. Now obviously aesthetically looking at it. It's going to be off compared to other forms because of the font sizes are going to change. However, it's easier to deal with that than trying to have somebody who's name get cut off or important information lost in the form. You could change the text color if you'd like. Generally speaking professionalism-wise you're going to keep that black. I guess the only time you'd really want to change it if you were putting form fields over a colored item you might want to reverse that or do some changes there, and then font choice. Feel free to select any of the fonts that are located in here. It's really up to you what you use. I suggest keeping with a standard font. Just because it's going to be what people are used to it it's going to be nice and clean. Position again, If you want to make adjustments. You can do minor adjustments in here. I know sometimes clicking and dragging is just not the most efficient way and you get very frustrated because the foreign field seemed to be. You know, just out of line just enough and you can't click and drag use this to make minor edits to that position within the document. You're able to make those small simple adjustments. So, even here if I want to do I can bump this over to 1.8 Instead of 1.79 and you're going to see the fill actually move we probably don't because it's so minor. Clicking in options, again how do you want your text aligned? Sometimes in text boxes it's better to have center especially in forms, but it's up to you, it's how you have your document set up. You can do Left, Center and Right. Default value allows you to put basically an answer into that fill already that somebody would then delete and change. How I feel about this and how you feel about this might be a little bit different. I don't like to put default values in just because it seems to be a little more frustrating. But some people like the form to use that position specifically to help them or help the user know what to put in there. Again, check spelling multi-line off scrolling long text I'm going to turn that off just because the font size is Adobe. You can use this for passwords. I'm going to just basically throw this out there right now. You can create password fills, you can create very sophisticated documents in Adobe Acrobat. However, realize that the liability of handling that password information is on you and how protected your server is and so, we'll just leave it at that. Basically, allow rich text formatting so you can allow different formatting of the text instead of just straight text in a survey fill, and then you could actually limit the number of characters. Realize that when you're doing that that does include spaces. So, what your total limit of characters needs to incorporate that. But I know sometimes we've used these types of forums on awards and so you have a 1,500 character limit. You can control that from within these properties. I'm going to close this out and I'm going to click on the radio buttons. So, to open up that property, because obviously all of the different fill types are going to have different properties, and you should really look through these to see what you can do. So, again we have the name receptionist which is the grouping name, fill type is not selectable, why? Because it's a radio button appearance. So, here you have a little bit different right. You have the circles, so the border colored the fill color, what you want them to look like. Positioning again and then options. Options is where things get a little different. I could do a check, a circle, a cross, a diamond, a square or a star. So, those are all dependent on how you want your button to look. Radio by choice. We already put in yes or no. That data is important again if you're going to collect this and do a survey and basically put all your results together. Think of the database side of it. What do you want that answer to be in your actual analysis? So, be considerate and thinking about what you want that to come up as. Button is checked by default. So, this is a great one as well because sometimes you want it to be on one option or the other when the user starts. You can control that from here, and buttons with the same name and choice are selected in unison. This is that option as I mentioned with the EMS form that you could have if it was male or female. You could select male and it would apply that to any time male is a radio button is in the document. So, again it's depending on how you want it to split this all up. Looking at the comments we already did we went through the properties for that and set that up again as multi-line. Signature is treating it just as a text filled. I could change this however to a signature fill. That means now it's specifically looking for a signature and what that's going to do, when we go back in a preview here, is it's going to ask people to be able to do those signature components with Adobe Acrobat. It's knowing that it's specifically looking for that signature document item. So, it does make a difference. Could you leave it as text. Sure, I mean there's nothing wrong with that, but you do realize that, you might want to leave it setting up a signature again just for clarification with how you'll handle this is in the future. Now, all these different fill types have different properties depending on what you're using. Make sure you go through take a look and see what makes the most sense for you. 8. Form Calculations: Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret: form calculations. This is a tool that's going to make your clients and customers absolutely love you. You can build logic into your Adobe forms, so that it automatically will do math calculations and the end user doesn't have to. You all know how much of a pain it is to have to go through and do the math sometimes when you're using those multi-setup forms. Why not make the software do it for you? So, that's what we're going to start. Let's get started. Form calculations are definitely a very interesting tool that can make it so your customers or clients have it as easy as possible or your own office staff. What you see here is just a basic table. Maybe you'd find it on an invoice or some sort of form. This was created in Microsoft Word and saved as a PDF. So, right now there's no functionality to it whatsoever. What we're going to do is we're going to make it to that. This table automatically does the calculations for you. The first thing we need to do is select the tool on the right Prepare Form. We're going through the process using the wizard again. I'm going to hit Start, it's going to go through. As you see, it basically already calculated different fields in this form. Now, for this form here, I'm going to be able to delete these bottom two, but everything else already has a table and a property label that it was applied automatically. Now, these aren't the most user-friendly options, but just to show you how the functionality works, we're going to just get started. I'm going to start off by clicking on this first cost item here, double-clicking to open the properties. Now, I know for sure the formatting, I want this to be a number, specifically currency. So, what I can do is go in here and set it up to look like currency. This is just going to be a good practice for dealing with all the cost and the totals. I'm going to go in the Total, double-click and also changes in the currency. Now, there's a calculate option in here because we're dealing with a table. Now, that we're inside Calculate, you get to set up exactly what you want to happen. So, what I'm going to do is take the value and product of cost and quantity to give me a total. Now, when I select Pick, it's going to pull up the different fields here. So, I know I want TotalRow1_2 and TotalRow1_3. I'm going to select those two checkboxes, hit OK, and now it knows for that Total box what exactly I wanted to do. I'm going to hit Close. When I go over to Preview, we're going to take a look at what happens. So, if I have a cost of $3 and I have four items, automatically we see $12 as the total, which means it's functioning exactly how I want it to. The next step is I'm going to just do the invoice total and I'm going to do that as well by doing the sum of the end products. So, we're going to move this field selection over here and look for the I want TotalRow1_4, 2_4, 3_4, and 4_4. So, I can go into TotalRow1_4, TotalRow2_4, TotalRow3_4, and TotalRow 4_4, hit OK and Close. I'm going to go back into preview here just to show you whatever I type in for these other areas, now remember we didn't format them or anything yet, it adds up and gives you my total invoice value. So, if I wanted to go through and do each of these steps to each individual item, I'd be able to have quite a good looking auto filling, auto calculating table within my PDF form. I'm actually going to multi-select here and open up some properties because what I can do is actually change these to look exactly how they need to look and make sure that everything looks good. What you're able to do with some of these things is really break it down and adjust just a few different options that you might want to take care of. I'm going to go in format all of these, so that all are set up, like currency, and obviously it's remembering my previous selection here, numbers, invoice total, make sure that set up as well. Now, when I go back in the preview, you can see at least the totals all look the same. They look good. I could change the alignment just to make sure things look like they're lining up properly. So, again, that's going to be positioning and some options here. Alignment center, close, back to preview, and there we are. So, again, it's very easy to build this logic into the PDF forms and when you do it makes it easier for your business staff, or your clients, or customers, and ultimately they'll really thank you in the end. So, be sure to play around with form calculations. Again, if you have an invoice or you want to digitalize something this is a great way to be able to do that. 9. Action Buttons: Action buttons are a really cool tool that are built-in that allow you to take your forms to another level. Think about it if you're collecting a paper survey and someone screwed up, they'd have to get another sheet of paper and start over, and the odds of them doing that and still turning in that survey are pretty low. So why wouldn't you include a button that allows them to wipe the form clean? Let's take a look at action buttons. Sometimes you want to have different things that work in the form specifically if you're going to paste it online. One of the things that are helpful are action buttons, so you're actually able to set up action buttons inside of Adobe Acrobat that do things like submit a form or clear a form. What we're going to walk you through is setting up a clear form button right now. So I'm in the PDF, I'm going to go in to prepare form, back into editing, and one thing to notice, you should have an okay icon up here. If you don't have the okay icon up here, you might be in e-signature mode. So one thing to check is click on more over on the right hand menu bar and you'll see Convert to Adobe Sign Form. If it says that, that means you're in the correct mode. If it doesn't say that, it'll say revert back to Adobe Acrobat. You want to make sure that you select that because it's not going to allow you to put in that button. So if you don't see that, make sure to check over here in more. Now we're in the correct mode, so I'm going to click on this okay and I'm going to scroll to the bottom of the page. I'm going to put a button here right in the middle, and it comes up as a blank field, so what I want us to do is be a clear button. So I'm just going to put clear form as a name and then select all properties. Now, what this does is it's actually going to pull up a clear form button. I want to put the Tooltip in, clear form, so people understand. Appearance for right now, I don't really care what color it is but realize you can change all those. You can change the positioning, some options. How do you want it to look? Right now it's showing up as a label only. However, you need to put in the label, so by typing in clear form, now you're going to actually see that down below on the button itself. I'm going to go in actions and now here's where we set up the details. Selecting the trigger for mouse up or mouse down when I put mouse down, so selection click and I can choose different actions, different things you can do in here. A lot of these are multimedia and web based but reset a form is an option. Now make sure that you hit add, and it's going to ask you what would you want to reset. Sometimes you only want to reset certain things within the form but for now everything is checked, feel free to deselect or select whatever you would like to do. Now, I'm going to hit okay. It now has a process and I'm going to close it. Now, when I go to preview the form, say that there's something in the comments, I can click clear form and it's gone and it actually resets the entire form. These are really common and really helpful especially if you are going to post these on the web. Just think about usability. Think about who your audience is, in particular, that it's not a bad idea to include this at any time when you're doing these digital forms. It also helps prepare you, if you're going to set up a survey which we're going to cover next. 10. Sending and Collecting Data: One of the features that not many people know about is actually being able to send out your surveys and forms through Adobe Acrobat DC, and collect that information for analysis. So, why not let the one piece of software do some of the work and organize it so that you can properly analyze your data? Let's jump in. Sending and actually collecting the data from the survey is really the important part, right? You want this survey to go out, you want to get all these facts, you want to get these experiences from your customers' clients and they need to collect that data to actually complete your assessment and analysis. Well, the nice thing is that you can actually build in some of these features right into Adobe Acrobat DC making this a lot easier to do. The first thing you need to do is you to think about how your forms going out. Most people send it out through e-mail and that's fine, that works. Some people even choose to print this out. So, you could print this out and have people fill up paper and that works too. But what I'm going to do is actually show you how to easily get people to fill this out digitally, return it to you and then collect that data together and use some sort of database or spreadsheet program to look at it altogether. So, here we are back in the in the survey, it's been completed, we have the form there. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to make this easier for people to return the document to me. So, we're going to go in to prepare form. As you see, we get our options back and I'm going to select the Okay button. So, when we're talking about action buttons before, we set up that clear button, we're going to instead set up a submit button. So, I am going to scroll down to the bottom here after the signature part and I am just going to plop it right in the middle. I'm going to call this Submit, and I am going to go to All properties. Now, as we learned before when working with action buttons, you need to focus on how they're going to actually function and how they're going to be displayed. I like to fill in the Tooltip, then I go to Appearance. Again, I'm not going to mess with the customization here but feel free to change it however you like. Position should be good where it is. Options, I am going to put the label in there and I'm going to call it Submit form. I want that to show up and make it really easy for somebody to be able to click that. Now for the different actions, Submit forms is the bottom one, I'm going to make sure that that is the selected action and I'm going to click Add. Now what you see in this screen are some different options and this can be kind of overwhelming. Realize that if you want to and have the ability to, if you have someone who works with coded or database programs, they can actually configure this data to go directly into your database especially if it's online. Now that takes a lot of setup, sophisticated equipment, potentially, you need that custom person who knows how that software, that hardware works. So I will make this a little bit easier instead. The FTF is the form data, we're going to leave that as is but what we're going to do is we're going to have them just sending this document to us directly. So, in for the URL, I'm going to do mail to Colin, and then this is where you would put your e-mail address or the e-mail address you want this sent to. So, I'm just going to put, example@gmail.com, then I click Okay. Now we have an action in there, I can close this out. We're going to go to a Preview. Now obviously, you'd want to fix the formatting because it is a little too big there. But when someone presses down on that button, it's going to pop open up prompts saying send e-mail using either the default e-mail application or if you want to use a web mail component, you have the ability to do that as well. Now these will be settings that the users configuring on their end. So, for right now, I'm going to do default email application because it'll be the easiest, it'll just open it up in mail. When I continue here, it's actually going to open up an e-mail and give me the ability to send that data back. When it does that, you have the ability to send a little message or whatever, the customer might send anything. But really, the important thing is that it's saying, "They are getting the data from this process." The user would then hit Save and it will show up directly in your inbox. Now this is a great step, right? Instead of having them fill it out and have to e-mail it back to you mainly, they can do it all at the same time which is absolutely fantastic. Now I'm going to go back into edit, and the reason why I'm going to do that is now we have to work with that data. What do we do with that data? Now when you're in the prepare form tool option, there's this more over on the right hand side. You're actually going to select that and you'll see you have the option to merge data files into a spreadsheet. This is the tool you're going to use to basically put all this data together in a nice easy spreadsheet to look at. I am going to Add files, now, I've already pre-filled out the survey and so, I have the ability to select the PDFs. Now remember, they're going to actually be sending you FTF files which is just the data, but you can also import PDF files in case maybe someone didn't use the Submit button or they didn't understand the process. Realize you can put all of this data together. I'm going to hit Select, you're going to see those in there, we're going to export it out. Now I'm just going to put the report inside the same folder and you have some options, XML or CSV depending on what you want to do. I'm going to use CSV, that's the standard format for any sort of databasing or any sort of Excel type program. Now I'm going to click View file now and what that's going to do is it's actually going to open up excel and you're going to see the data right there. Survey names, the client names, the dates, all the fields, if they signed it or not, how they signed it, and the comments are all located inside. This is a great way to basically congregate your data, perform your data analysis and really complete your assessment. This can be the key information for making changes to your business, looking at customer satisfaction, and overall, judging how successful your company may be. So, again, as I mentioned before, assessment is really key to your business and Adobe Acrobat DC gives you the ability to really take care of that. 11. Conclusion: Well, that wraps everything up. I hope you've followed along, been able to create your own document, and have started working on your project. Your assignment really is just to help lock in these skills, but if anything was confusing or I went too fast, the nice thing is that you can go back and re-watch that segment. The more you use Adobe Acrobat DC, the more you'll get comfortable with it, and soon, you'll be cranking up these surveys in no time. You never know, this could be a side job for you or you end up doing this as a consulting for other people. It's something that I ended up doing. So just make sure, take the time again, focus on your assessment, and really enjoy creating these surveys. The more data points you can collect, the more information you know, and really, in business, the more information you have, the better off you're going to be. Be sure to check out my other classes on Skillshare, and thanks for tuning in.