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- Create a Form
A tutorial in 3 steps - Create a PDF
from any document - Create Form Fields
using Adobe Acrobat - Conduct a Survey
The do's and dont's...
how to create fillable fields
Tab order
Almost done. First a small procedure that will save your form fillers' day: Click the Pages tab (on the left side of your document window), right-click the first page and choose Page Properties. Set Tab Order to Use Document Structure. (Do this for every form you ever create, unless you for some obscure reason want the tab sequence to match the order in which the fields were created)
Test your form
Always test your form
Choose the Hand Tool and fill out the form. Switch between fields with the TAB button. Notice that your address wraps line as you press return (since you specified it to be multi-line). Everything you just entered will turn up as default values when you save the form, meaning: erase all values before saving. But we're not going to save just yet.
By now, you should have noticed that you can't de-check the pet value. Here's the solution: Select the Object Tool aka "The Arrow". With this tool, you can access any form element at all. Clone one of the checkboxes (by ctrl-dragging), switch back to the Hand Tool, check the new radio button, switch back to Object Tool, mark the new radio button and delete it! Phew... Since you wonder why we included a prefix (10, 30, 20) in every field name, here's the reason: When (if) Acrobat sends the filled out form to a web server, it sorts the fields according to field name (and for some obscure reason, NOT according to tab order). Without the prefices, your report would read "Address, Name, Pet" in that order. Since "Name, Pet, Address" is the prefered order in this case (because I say so), the fields have to be prefixed. Why not simply use '1, 2, 3' as prefices? Well consider what happens when you create field "11". The fields will be ordered "1, 11, 2, 3".