The longest line in excel land

June 16, 2008 8:37 AM

I need help making sense of data from an adobe form that I want to export to excel. Adobe just laughs and excel simply shrugs.

I have a simple adobe acrobat form that my field sales agents fill out every week giving the status of all their large contracts. The info is in a table and contains 9 items of info per contract (on one line). There are usually about 15 or twenty projects per form so 20 lines of information per form.
The problem comes when I receive the form and it gets imported to the dataset. I then would like to export to excel (as csv) and have my way with all this data but I can't - it gets exported to one incredibly long line. As I understand it , this is what adobe does and there isn't really a workaround.
So what are my options other than many tedious hours of cutting and pasting every week? Is there a way to manipulate the excel data or should I rather be using infopath and acess maybe? Please bear in mind I am very much an amateur with databases and such so please keep it to basics.
I'll watch this thread in case anyone wants any more information.

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

If each field in your Acrobat form is named, and you send it out to your sales agents via the form submittal feature, the data will be returned to you as a table that can then be exported. To fake a table, you'll have to create fields for each cell.
posted by wheat at 8:56 AM on June 16

PDF Converter from Nuance has the ability to accomplish what you're looking for.
posted by X4ster at 9:08 AM on June 16

@wheat
We are using the form sbmittal feature and the forms are coming back to us as full, completed forms with tables intact. The problem comes in as soon as we export to CSV. When I open the csv file the entire form export is on one long line. Am I missing something?
posted by Umhlangan at 9:12 AM on June 16

@Umhlangan. I think you are missing something, but I can't put my finger on it. Any chance you can send me a copy of the form? Email address is on my profile page.
posted by wheat at 9:31 AM on June 16

Sending in 2 minutes wheat.
posted by Umhlangan at 9:43 AM on June 16

I have since found out that the form was designed in Livecycle designer if that makes any difference.
Maybe I should expand the question - is there an easier or less painful way to collect this small quantity of data on a regular basis?
posted by Umhlangan at 10:23 AM on June 16