Using the New Adobe Forms Central to Distribute PDF Forms
- Signing Up for Adobe FormsCentral
- Creating a Form from a Template
- Editing Your Form
- Testing Your Form
- Distributing Your Form
- Seeing Where the Form Data Is Collected
- Summary
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
A vast majority of us want our own website and/or blog. And with that web presence, we invariably want some way to create a form to collect user information. In the past, you’d have to attempt to create a PDF form you could post on your site, but that has its issues. You could also try and learn about CGI-bins and Perl scripts, or hire a developer to “help you out.”
Well, those days are behind us. If you want to create a form and collect user information, you can use Adobe FormsCentral. This service allows you to “easily create, distribute, and analyze online forms.” That means that you can create a good-looking form from either a template or from scratch, put it on a web page via a link or embedding it directly, send it out via Twitter or other methods, collect responses, and save those responses as a PDF, Excel, or CSV (comma-separated text file) (see Figure 1). Pretty easy. You can even create a form for free or pay a monthly or annual fee and unlock some of the other options on FormsCentral like multi-page forms, redirecting users to a different page of your choice, collecting data from more than 50 users (that’s the free account’s limit), and more.
)
Figure 1 The Adobe FormsCentral website
Sound interesting? Well, lets get started creating your first form! While we can’t cover every feature and option in FormsCentral, I want to give you an overview of the features possible.
Signing Up for Adobe FormsCentral
Signing up for a FormsCentral account is easy. Simply visit https://http://www.acrobat.com/formscentral/en/home.html and sign up (see Figure 2). What’s great is that you can sign up for the free account at first, then upgrade later!
)
Figure 2 Create your Adobe FormsCentral account