Advanced form fields

Transcript

In this hands on tutorial. Learn how to set up calculations, create an email, submit button and quickly update form pages without rebuilding all your existing form fields. To follow along, open the project estimate pdf in the tools pane. Select Add under the prepare form tool to include it in the right hand pane for easy access. Now some of the fields are already set up, but not the subtotal field here in the middle. So first let’s select all the table fields, right click and select, Create multiple copies. This command is very useful if you have multiple rows in a table, use a bounding box to select the second row of fields and then you can use the arrow key to move into place. Notice the hierarchical naming the dots zero and one at the end of the form fields. This is very beneficial for calculations. To set up the subtotal calculation, double click the field to open the properties and make sure the format is set up as a number. Select the calculate tab and choose the value is product up and then add the rate and hours field for the first row. You can leave the properties dialog open and just like the second subtotal field and do the same by selecting the second row hour and rate fields with the properties dialog still open, go ahead and select the grand total field. This should be a read only field so it can’t accidentally be modified in the format tab. Choose the number format and currency symbol under the calculation tab. Select value is the sum of this time and we don’t need to select all the fields. Instead, we can just select the subtotal field. Now let’s test the calculations by selecting preview or using the keyboard shortcut. We’ll just enter some test data and notice how the calculation is automatically made. Next will add a button to submit by email to click the forms to do this, I set preview mode and select the button field. We’ll add it to the bottom of the page. Let’s go ahead, name the fields, submit by email and select all properties in the appearance step. Choose your colors and font. I’ll make this darker gray with white text for display consistency, select a font above the line because these are built into Acrobat in the options tab, Select label only and type submit by email so the button has a label under the actions tab. Select submit a form and then enter mail to colon and your email address down below. Be sure to choose the complete PDF so you can easily collect the responses and when you preview the form you should see a hand appear when you hover over the submit button. Now we’ve done quite a bit of work on the fields in this form by building custom calculations in a submit button. But what happens if you need to revise the underlying content? You can use the Replace pages command without touching all the existing form fields. To do this, open the left navigation pane and select page thumbnails. Right Click and choose Replace pages. Choose the Project estimate Replace page PDF that was included in the file. Download. Confirm that you want to replace the pages and this is a quick and easy way to make content revisions to your form without having to rebuild all your custom form fields. This hands on tutorial was designed to walk through some advanced form field techniques that help build professional forms and accurately capture form data.