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Create Fillable PDF Forms Easily

  • May 26, 2011
Gone are the days where you were forced to print a PDF and manually fill out form fields with your pencil. The PDF form has matured, and there are lots of tools out there such as Acrobat.com, Adobe ConnectNow, and Adobe FormsCentral to help you distribute the form to the masses and get the information into a usable form. Adobe expert Brian Wood shows you the different ways to create and edit a fillable form, with a few tips and tricks as well.
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Create Fillable PDF Forms Easily

It always blows me away how much easier it is to create a PDF fillable form these days, especially in later versions of Acrobat where the fields can be “detected.” It used to be sort of a dark art, creating and distributing forms. Well, the PDF form has matured, and there are lots of tools out there such as Acrobat.com, Adobe ConnectNow, and Adobe FormsCentral to help us distribute the form to the masses and get that information back into a usable form.

In this article, you’ll learn the different ways to create and edit a fillable form, with a few tips and tricks as well. Here’s a list of topics we’ll cover:

  • The different ways to approach form field creation
  • Add form fields
  • Edit form fields
  • Setting tab order

NOTE

This article is going to show you how to work with what are called AcroForms, or forms created and edited in Adobe Acrobat. If you are on the Windows platform and you purchase Acrobat X Pro, LiveCycle Designer is bundled with it. LiveCycle Designer is a separate application in which you can create dynamic PDF forms. This article will not touch on forms created in LiveCycle Designer. For more information in LiveCycle Designer, visit Adobe’s website.

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Last Update: November 17, 2020