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An interactive PDF form is a great way of capturing information from a group of people and Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional makes the creation of these forms a breeze. It also has features for distributing the form and then tracking people’s responses.

The PDF format is a great choice for forms since it will allow the user to see the form exactly as it was created. Web forms, by contrast, can vary depending on the operating system and browser software being used.

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.

The ability to create forms has long been a feature of Adobe Acrobat. However, Acrobat 8 Professional takes form creation to a new level in terms of ease and sophistication.

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.

When using forms created in other applications as the basis of an Acrobat form, you can now choose “Run Form Field Recognition” form the “Forms” menu and Acrobat will examine the layout of the form and create interactive form fields automatically.

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional’s Scan From Paper feature also allows you to create an interactive PDF form that is based on a printed document.

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.