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Forums > Software > Acrobat/PDF
Written by Terri Stone on February 27, 2008
Hi all,
I'm wondering if you've created interactive PDFs, and if so, what your experience was like. We may publish an article on the topic. (Don't worry, I won't mention you if you don't want to go public!)
Thanks,
Terri
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Excel equations into PDF
I'm not that good a form person to answer this. (More into multimedia than forms.) And I know nothing about Excel equations.
However, have you tried the Calculate tab in the Text Field options?
There is a way to specify that the text field (form) add the sum of two other fields. Without understand exactly what it is that your Excel forumla does, I would suggest that this area would do what you want.
Regarding others opening and saving the information, you need to choose the Enable Usage Rights in Adobe Reader under the Advanced menu.
This will let your Reader-only users to open, fill in the form, and then save for later use.
Excel to Acrobat
We are trying to do something simple. We want to take our time sheet that was created in Excel and make it an interactive PDF. Two problems, I cannot figure out how to translate the equations i.e. =SUM((out_2-in_2)+(out-in)) from excel into acrobat. Secondly, I am the only person in my office with Acrobat Pro. Is there any way to create an interactive PDF that our employees can enter information then save and open again while retaining the information? Every time I create a pdf from Acrobat Pro and open it in Reader it says you can only print for your records?
Thanks.
May not need to reprogram in Acrobat!
I asked interactive PDF Queen Sandee Cohen about your situation, and she told me this:
"Once you have created the original Acrobat document, and added your
own programmed buttons, DON'T export the corrected page from InDesign
with interactive elements. They're screwing up the interactive
elements when you replace the pages.
"Export the corrections from ID as ordinary PDFs and then swap the
pages. That will leave your programmed buttons alone."
Hope that helps!
Terri Stone
Editor in Chief, CreativePro.com
InDesign to Acrobat
Yes, our studio is actually working on an interactive pdf newsletter right now. We built the original file in InDesign using layers and specified buttons in InDesign. Then when we export to Acrobat the buttons are in all the right places and we can assign layer visibility actions to them to turn on and off layers to create a sense of animation.
The biggest drawback we are running into is that when we make a change to the InDesign file we need to redo all the programming in Acrobat - the replace pages feature which works so nicely with forms doesn't seem to work so well with layer visibility.