Acrobat order form

February 06, 2021

Working with a non-profit organization for their yearly fundraiser, where they would go and sell fruit, meat, and cheese gift boxes. Due to the COVID we tried something different and created a fillable PDF that people can fill out their orders and email to the director. I’ve removed the non-profit and the organization’s information from the document.

InDesign:

To start I merged the 2 separate order forms (2 different catalogs) Since the sheets were made for the volunteers to sell to multiple people I merged that area together in InDesign and filled in the areas with the groups information and for people to fill in their contact information. When printed out and the group can fold over and tape to the box making it easier for people to read and deliver the orders. Exported the file out as a PDF.

PDF Pro:

Opened the PDF in Acrobat Pro. From here I needed to setup the form. In tools > forms when you click on forms for the first time, for that file, it will ask you if you want to create a form from another PDF or this one, I created from this one. It goes through and created fields for elements it thinks are supposed to be fields. To be more precious it’s good to go back and rename the boxes if needed. You may get some ‘text field 1, 2, 3…’ If you keep the form as a PDF all the way through you don’t need to change these. If you will be sending as a data file it will be easier to read if you change them to what these stand form.

I went through and added any extra fields check boxes, radio buttons, etc, that Acrobat missed.

I created the amount fields for the items; his is where the customers will put in the number of the items they want for items. At the end of the rows is a calculation cell. To in Acrobat I The amount fields removed the other fields then created one field, and sized it to the box. I set the field to be a number with no decimals, people will only be able to order in whole numbers. Also gave it a unique name and it has to start with an alpha character (ap230), we’re going to be calculating later and numbers at the beginning area issues. I then copied this throughout the other order boxes; afterwards went back and changed the names to the product sucha as (ap230), since they will be calculated they can’t be named the same.

At the end of the rows under ‘Amount Due’ this needs to show the grand total. This is set with a field set to a number with no decimal places, all the amounts are whole number, thus leaving the grand total to also be a whole number. In the property’s menu click the calculate tab and have the totals set in there. For example, the first item will be:

(ap2300*22) + the next one

What this is doing is taking the number amount entered into the field ap2300 then times it by how much it is per unit, in this case $22. Then after that it will be added to the next element. So each field is getting its total then added to the amount due column. Copy this format for the next row.

With each of the two rows totaled then there is the Grand Total filled out. The grand total is the same setup as the ‘Amount Due’ except the total is gathered in the ‘Calculate’ tab as ‘The value is the sum of the following fields’ click ‘Pick…’ next to the box and click the check marks by the fields you want it to add together.

The email button is set using the button choice in the forms menu, it’s the one with ‘OK’ in the center. Click it, then click when you want it in the PDF to have a button placed, move as necessary. To change the name of the button displayed is in the ‘Options’ tab in the ‘Label’ field what’s typed there will show on the button. You can do customization to the button font, font size, colors, etc. To have it email the form click the ‘Actions’ tab and set to mouse up; mouse up is telling the program not to trigger until release. Mouse down happens as soon as you click. Select submit a form; then a popup box will show in ‘Enter a URL for this link:’ put in ‘mailto:’ followed by your email, example:

mailto:name@server.com

When they click the email button it will attach a copy of the PDF to an end. In ‘Export Format’ choose how you want the data to be sent, if you want data only or if you want the full PDF file to be submitted. Field Selection, will only be available in certain choices you can decide which of the fields will be sent when sending the email. For this form we had it send the full PDF that way it will be easier just to print, then importing the data back into a file to be printed.

Link to PDF Form:

https://www.lynnamacher.com/pdf/orderSheet-webExample.pdf

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