Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

At IT Training & Education, we have a workshop called Acrobat 9: Forms, which teaches you the basics of creating Acrobat forms, along with how to distribute them, and collect data, along with several ways to store that data once collected.  It covers all the major aspects of creating forms in Acrobat 9 Pro.

However, there is a lesser known program called LiveCycle Designer, which is installed with Acrobat Pro, which can also create forms.  These forms can be created from a template, or a spreadsheet, and it can even start with a blank document. It can also create forms that can be connected to a database, and can create more complex calculated fields using FormCalc or JavaScript (JavaScript can also be used in Acrobat 9).  LiveCycle Designer is a much more complex program, and unfortunately we don't have time in Acrobat 9: Forms to cover it.

Now that IU students, faculty and staff can access lynda.com, you can now learn how to use this program, and create forms in a different way which might work better for your situation.  One of the main benefits of LiveCycle Designer is that it can give you a better starting point, since LiveCycle forms do not need a pre-existing file to work from, unlike Acrobat 9 Pro.
In Acrobat 9 Pro: Creating Forms from lynda.com (make sure you're logged in through IT Training & Education's lynda.com portal to access the workshop), Brian Wood covers the creation of Forms in both Acrobat Pro and LiveCycle Designer.

However, if you've already taken Acrobat 9: Forms from IT Training & Education, you can skip sections 1, 2 and 3 of the lynda.com video series, giving you a head start on getting through the rest of the videos, and saving approximately the same amount of time you would have spent in the IT Training & Education workshop.  Understanding form creation can probably save you time learning LiveCycle Designer as well.
Suggested IT Training & Education Prerequisites:

• Acrobat 9: Forms - Optional prerequisite. Covers the first 3 sections of Acrobat 9 Pro: Creating Forms on lynda.com, including Form creation and distribution.

In a standard workflow, PDF creation generally comes at the end of the process.  But what happens if you have a last minute change after the PDF has already been created and edited with special features like links, multimedia, and form fields?  Re-creating the PDF from scratch means doing all that work again, and the Touchup Text tool can only replace and remove small mistakes, not big ones.

Luckily, in Acrobat, we have the Replace Pages feature.  This allows us to select a page, or range of pages to replace with a page or set of pages from another document.  This is incredibly useful, because it allows us to make larger changes without remaking the entire PDF.

The best part about replacing pages though, is that it retains all of your special features, like Links.  You might have to move them around in the new document, but pressing and dragging is much better than completely replacing.

Let's see how to do this now.

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With the announcement that IU had acquired free Adobe software for all of it's employees and students, your first thought was probably "How do I get it?" Now that we've all had a couple of months to get the software downloaded and installed, you're likely thinking now: "What do I do with all of this stuff?"

Adobe is one of the largest software companies in the world, and while most people are familiar with their core apps, like Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash, there are many applications included in the suite that you might not be familiar with. In this post, we'll take some time to examine all the different applications that you can install with the various Adobe suites. We will focus on the applications in Design Premium CS4 and Production Premium CS4. There are many add-ons and extra technology included in the installers, but we will look only at the applications included.

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