Making a dumb form smarter

March 24, 2008 2:08 PM

I've been tasked with creating a fillable form for invoices at work. However, I need it to be dynamic/flexible, and I'm not sure how to do that.

The form is a "Statement of Work" - an invoice, essentially. The main part of the form is a table with line items and costs. The line items vary in length as well as how many there are. I want a form that can handle both of those things.

Right now the form is built in Excel, and well, it doesn't take much for it to exceed the margins in some weird way and print wrong. I have tweaked the spreadsheet, but I still want something better.

Can a PDF even do something like that (I have Acrobat Pro 8)? Do I just grit my teeth and build it in Word? Is there some other way I'm not aware of?

I'm on a Mac, but the people using this will be on PCs.

posted by O9scar to computers & internet (6 comments total)

A PDF can do this (you can even incorporate javascript, or the Adobe scripting language, the name of which I cannot remember, at the moment), but the only way I know how to do this is using the Acrobat Livecycle Designer (which, when I last checked was made only for PC). I wound up running it via Parallels to do what I needed to do. (Hopefully someone will come along with a native mac solution)
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 2:13 PM on March 24

I don't know if this is exactly the answer your looking for, but I've used Microsoft Access for similar tasks and it's done just fine. You can create forms that use all sorts of different fields, and whenever one gets submitted it sends it back to a central data base.
posted by pandemic at 2:14 PM on March 24

What is the user supposed to do when he or she finishes filling out the form? Is the data supposed to go into a database? Or does it just get printed out?

I don't know if Microsoft templates work on a Mac, but I've used their Excel invoice templates before, and the lines do word-wrap. If the invoices are just getting printed out (or emailed) as opposed to being stored in a database, this is an easy way out.
posted by desjardins at 3:03 PM on March 24

Livecycle is way too expensive to consider, never mind the Mac issue.

The forms are printed, but the "raw" form they take isn't critical. We use PDF as the end result since they're harder to modify than a Word doc/etc would be.
posted by O9scar at 4:10 PM on March 24

Not sure if it fits your requirements but do take a look at wufoo. It's awesome
posted by swapspace at 4:43 PM on March 24

(For what it's worth, I have been developing professionally for PDF for more than 10 years now, primarily on Macs. It's the core of my business. )

PDF and Acrobat 8 Pro can definitely do what you describe. You don't need LiveCycle Designer (although it does make making growing tables somewhat easier). You create the base document in whatever layout software you have available, create a 'dumb' PDF, and then add fields and logic (the 'brains') in Acrobat 8 Pro on top of that. (LiveCycle Designer is Windows-only, so to use it on a Mac you will need the usual Parallels or VMWare Fusion and the Windows version of Acrobat Pro. But again, for a simple form like you describe you don't need it.)

There will be some programming involved if you want the "bells and whistles", such as adding up columns, or showing/hiding rows in the table. Acrobat's programming language is JavaScript, using the JavaScript 1.6 Core and application-specific extensions. The documentation can be downloaded from the Adobe developer site.

The best place to start for more PDF info is on the PlanetPDF forums.
posted by derMax at 1:02 AM on March 25 [1 favorite]