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Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional can be used, among many other things, for creating and distributing interactive forms and keeping track of peoples’ responses as they are sent back to the form’s originator.

Most interactive forms are encountered on the web. However, there are benefits to using PDFs instead. For one thing, the format of the original form is always preserved in a PDF whereas web forms can display differently in different browsers.

There is also immediacy and flexibility of delivery. The form can be emailed to a group of users at the same time. The delivery of the form then becomes a single operation. PDF forms can also be distributed via CDs and DVDs.

Forms are not new to Acrobat: the feature has been available since version 3. However, Acrobat 8 Professional has seen a great enhancement to the way interactive forms are handled.

Instead of relying purely on other applications to supply its content, Acrobat can now create forms from scratch using a utility called Adobe Life Cycle Designer. It also includes some useful form templates such as conference registration, employee appraisal, etc.

As before, you can use forms made in other software such as Word or QuarkXPress. However, now Acrobat has a feature for automatically recognising where fields need to be inserted and creating them for you.

If you wish to use some of your printed forms as starting points for your interactive PDF form, then Acrobat’s Scan From Paper option will offer just what you need.

As well as having Acrobat automatically generate text fields for you, you can add a variety of other controls, such as drop-down menus, tick boxes and radio buttons. Then you finish it off by adding a submit button.

Traditionally, only a full version of Acrobat would allow you to fill out a PDF form and then save the form data to disk. With Acrobat 8 professional, if you click on the “Advanced” menu and choose “Enable Usage Rights in Acrobat Reader”, people filling out your form with Acrobat Reader will be able to save their form data and email it back to you.

You can send your interactive PDF form to any number of users by clicking on the “Form” menu and choosing “Distribute Form”. You can select a series of emails from an Outlook address book or just enter recipients manually.

Acrobat 8 Professional now contains a facility for storing each of the returned form in one place, called a dataset. As you open each returned form, a dialogue box appears prompting you to add the form data to the dataset.

To complete your project, after you have received back all the forms you distributed, you simply open the Acrobat dataset and click on the export button to save it as a .csv file. You can then import this file into Microsoft Excel or Access for storage and/or analysis.