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Form Submissions and Responses

So one of the best quotes that was made after we went out break was, I won't mention Kathy's name here, but Kathy said, Thank you so much for having this class. Now we can make our PdF's not sucky, which is fantastic. And, you know, interestingly enough, one of the things for those long time listeners. You know, I'm into cars. So every time there's the Greenwood Car show every year in Seattle here, which is like 20 blocks long, that Charles like 40 or 50,000 people. And so what they do is they hand out this PDF, which is great. And this Pdf, you have to then print out, fill in and send back. And so, of course, when I do, every single time I get it is I go in and idea my little auto form field recognition here. It walks through the entire thing, and I've got my entire forms filled out for me. Just the way need to. I go in there, I feel it in tip printed out. Send it all back. And every time I go in there, just like, how did you go in there and type in there? And it's like. Hmm. Well, it...

's a long story, but anyway, that's what I dio. And there's my form. Nice and simple. It's that easy and works every single time. I always impressed myself, and I do that so you two can impress yourself when you do that for other people. So now we're getting back Teoh being able to fill out these forms and collect the data and the content from these forms. So when I take this form and I begin to fill in these forms No, that's not my middle name. Really? What's your legal name? Really Now? Really Up. I can't type in the word. Yes. How old am I? Well, I act like I'm 12 so we might as well just put that in ST A. Jess? Yes, Seattle. And I'm done filling out the form if I fill out the form here or I put it out there so somebody can fill out the form they can then save the form, and they could just take it and attach it to an email and send it back. But I can also create a submit button that allows me to submit the form to somebody so that if I'm doing a very large, uh, just distribution of this form, it could go to multiple people. So yesterday we talked about creating buttons, and I'm going to do that here at the bottom of this forum by going into the form editing mode, clicking on my button button and throwing a button, and this is going to be my submit form. Click on the all properties. I'm going to set the appearance here. I need to make us really big and bold. So options just gonna do a label only, and it's just going to be submit form. And then I want to apply an action to this, and the action is going to be submit this form when it's done. So under the select action we have on mouse up, we're going to go in and submit a form. We add that action to the actions window. But before we actually add it, here's what happens when we use a submit form button. So I'm gonna enter a link, Um, for the girl that I want to send this to now, I can send this to a Web address. I can send it to a server, but if you want to mail it back to somebody, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the mail to command mail to all one word. And then I put in my email address that I wanted to go back to and again I cannot type. So this is my email address that I wanted to go back to with this. How do I want to submit this form? In many cases, it's going to be a very small distribution of form. So I may put this on a website and may get five people a month sending this back to me. So I have my choices. I can email back the complete PdF, which is the pdf with all of the save data forms. Everything else I can then take this form and do whatever I want with it. Now, I can also go back and do an FTF file. And fbf file is a forms data format. By doing it this way, I don't get the pdf back. All I get is the pdf forms data back, and it comes back looking very much like a pdf icon. It's just labeled on fbf file. So some of the interesting things that weaken Dio with an FTF file is this We can export all the fields to a forms data format. Or I could go in and select specific fields that just get submitted back to me. Have that I can also do comments if I want to. I can go ahead. And the incremental changes to the pdf I can export is HTML or the newer version of FTF, which is X ftf files here. If I do the entire pdf file, I get the pdf file back with all of its contents There I have it the f d f I just get the data back. Okay, So pick and choose what it is that you want to do. If I choose the complete pdf and I click, OK, And then I closed the button. Here I go back to my clothes form editing submit forms a bit large for the button there. Now I'm done with it. I can go in and save the entire thing. And when I hover over this button, it shows me it's going to be emailed back to me. So I click on this and it asked me how do you want to email this back? Do I want to use your native desktop email application such as Eudora, email Outlook or Mac Male itself, or don't want to use the Internet email. So I've got Gmail or Yahoo or something like that. What I'm gonna need to do, then, is the submit button really doesn't become that much of ah ah, great thing. If I use an Internet email, what only to do is only to save this, pdf some place on my desktop or on my hard drive, launch my Internet email application and then attached this back to here. If I use the desktop email application, it will automatically open up my email application. Start a new email attached. This, pdf immediately. I just have to write whatever you want to hit, send and it's done. So that's what happens. So this is using the email client service right there. If we do go in here and we edit the form here and we mail this to E u r l or some type of server, then is going to go directly to that link or to that server without using it, most people go ahead and use the email there. That's one way we can do it. We don't need to have a submit button on here. I could just as easily have people email it back to me without doing the submit button. The submit button is just one of those things. If that you have it going WRL or a link or a server, it'll go right to it. But with the link button or the submit button is kind of cool because people see this and psycho I run Microsoft Outlook. It will take care of this for me and it automatically happens. So don't have to have the submit button. But when you do, this is what you have to go through when you get the submit button right there. When we're done with this file and everything's ready to go and we save it, we filled out the form here. This is what you're going to get if somebody emails it back to you. So I get this email, I open it up and here is the for more. Great. I see all this information is here. I get forms like this back every day. I need to get the data out of these forms. So in order to do that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go under the Mawr Forum options, and I'm going to manage my form data so I can export the data from this forms file by choosing this. And it asked me, Where do I want to go to or how do I want to do this? Forms data, ex ftf file XML file or just a simple text file. So if I just do an ftf file here and I save it to my desktop, it just looks like this. Clear all this out of the way. Here. This is a forms data file. Looks very much like an acrobat icon there, but it's just a forms data file. It doesn't contain the actual pdf in there at all. So if I wanted to go in and I wanted Teoh see what this forums data file was like Then I could go in to the file and I could open up my form right there so I could open up my full form right there. Actually, my form ready to go? I could open up. My reader enabled one right there. I could go into my tools under my forms here under more options. And I could import the data in there. And this is a one that's reader enabled here. So I have to save a copy of this so that I could use this and open up that copy there because this was a reader enabled one. And I cannot edit the reader enabled file. So this is no longer reader enabled another way we can go in and manage our form data here, we'll show you the long way around how to set up an entire loop system where we can share the files, actually use the distribute function, feature everything else. When we have our data here, I can actually merge all of my data files into a spreadsheet. I'm gonna click be collecting data files over quite some time. So when emerged these files into a spreadsheet, I can go in, and I can add forms, data files as well as acrobat files to here so I can collect us in multiple different ways. If I go in and I select these files here and click select, I can import all these responses that I get into a spreadsheet. So maybe I saved these files. I get 20 or 30 of these a day, and at the end of every day, I just take all these files, manage these instead of doing it one by one and exporting the data I'm in export the data from multiple forms. So I choose all of those I click export. And it asked me, How do I want to save these? Well, generally I'm gonna do this is a comma delimited text which allows me to open it up in numbers or an excel. And when I do this, it's just going to give me an Excel spreadsheet. And so I say that file on my desktop. I view that file now, and it goes ahead and don't know why it's launching Dreamweaver here. But who knows? Maybe we'll give me the correct look and feel. So this is not how it would normally look. Um, obviously opening up in Dreamweaver here, um, would not be the right thing to do. So let me do this and I'm going to open this with, and I'll open this up and text at it here so we can actually see, not really a great format here, but what it does is it actually gives me my headers here, the last name, the salutation, the first name, everything else on how it looks. If we open this up in Excel, the last name field would then have my name next to it. The first name field would have my name next to it and all the check boxes, and this would go in and fill out an Excel spreadsheet just like that. If I had 10 of these files, every single place where it said last name, the data would have the person's last name, row by row. And if you followed the rose across there, we'd have all that information. We don't have excel on this mission because we don't teach Excel here. Thankfully, not that excels a bad application. But, you know, this is all about things. All things fun and creative here. Um, I know you can do creative things and excel, but just getting creative with numbers doesn't sound as good, does it? So when we have this, we have all the data right here and important to excel. It's great. Every header will have the information in there. So that's how we can go and actually capture the data out of these files so that we can use them later on. Now, what we've been doing here is even able to go through and take all of our forms here, be able to go in and send these out by using the submit button or send them out just by emailing them somebody and doing just a very simple forms collection here, importing exporting data out of a single one or taking multiple forms that have been filled out compiling all together. We can do this on a more robust scale. And under the forms menu, we can go in and we can choose Distribute. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to my blank form here because I want to get this blank form. And I've already got this all set up ready to go in Acrobat. And I'm gonna go when and click distribute here. And in order to do this, I need to save it. Before I do this, I click save and save it to my desktop here, and it's now ready to go. This is for a full on distribution of acrobat forms. I'm gonna be sending us out to multiple people. I want to make sure I track everything. I want to see that it's going to go to people and make sure everything's good. So I have different ways that I can use. This I can use Acrobat service acrobat dot com, which is a for FY service, which allows you to down night organize everything right online so it tracks everything. I can manually correct responses in my email inbox, or I can designate a server where all the responses come back. And when I was trying to do response there, it needed a response file set up so that everything goes to a specific file and this is how you set up your responses here. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to go in and kind of walk you through these really quickly. If I go in and say I'm going to collect these in my email box, you'll see that all of the icons change here was using acrobat dot com. They have the world for the World Wide Web. It secured comes back to you, secure it comes okay, great. It's all the same thing. It's all gonna be distributed. You're gonna respond. You're going to collect the data. These icons make no difference whatsoever. It's just going to show you in different graphical weighs the same thing is going to happen. Okay, So if I use acrobat dot com which I have an account you could go through, it stays up there. You can manage everything remotely. I'm just going to do there really quick response here by going in and using my email inbox. What it is is I send this out as a file to everybody using my mail client, and I'm going to go ahead and collect these responses as well. So I click next and I want to send it automatically using Adobe Acrobat, Oregon. Save a copy of it, and he knelt later. While we're here, we might as well just go through and send it. I click next and then I need to go in and put in the email address from me so that everybody knows where it's coming from. And this is my title organization. Name everything else. Great. So I click next and this is exactly how the email is going to look when it comes to people. This is the two form. So if I have, I can go and click on this and I can get all my contacts and put them in here or list them out. And this is going to be the subject line that everyone's going to see in the email. Please complete the form ready to go distributed. PdF And here's what it ISS You're invited to complete this form. You can use acrobat or reader to fill in this form. Click the attachment. Open this when you're finished. Click submit. If you don't have the latest version of reader, there's an active link that you can click on. Get that to get the version of reader Now. You'll notice I did not go in and save this as a reader enable. Pdf. This does it for you. One of the steps in the process that it automatically goes and does that. That's why it tells you right here you can open it an acrobat, er, acrobat reader, because part of the distribute form system is it enables it for reader for you. So when we're ready to do this, everything's good we go ahead and click the two button and then they can go here and put in my email address and click send and what is going to do? What is going to launch? I launched the email browser and you can see right down here at the very bottom here. I want to make this very clear. So it says extending features an adobe reader That's part of the process of the distribute. It does it automatically right here. So what this will do? Is it a launch? Your email and it'll go through and you click send and everything works. And of course, we haven't set up. I haven't set this up here in order to be able to do that. When the whole thing gets sent, it gives you a notification that it's been sent to everybody. And then what's gonna happen is the emails are gonna start coming back to you. So what do you do with them? Well, sure, you can collect them one by one in there, But the wonderful thing about the distribute method is you can go in and you can call up your tracker, and your track organ is going to show up here when we are using our distribute method here. And the tracker is a whole different window, whole different look and feel inside of Acrobat. And when you get your response emails back in the response back to you with those emails, there's gonna be a link to the tracker here.