I'm going to show you three different ways to auto
populate form fields by repeating or duplicating a field throughout your PDF document in
Adobe Acrobat Pro. Let's take a look. Okay, here we have our PDF open,
and we are in Adobe Acrobat Pro. I've clicked on "Prepare a Form." So,
once you have all your tools available, just click on "Prepare a Form," and
then we have our form fields here. Now, in this document, we want to repeat
the name field. One of the things that we can do if we have a PDF where we have
multiple pages (so, in this example, we have a two-page PDF here), and I want to
have the name repeated at the top. All I have to do is select the field that has the name.
I'm going to right-click and then click on "Duplicate Across Pages." And it will ask me if
I want to duplicate on all the pages of my PDF, or I can select a range. I'm going to click
"OK" to duplicate this on the top of the second page. And when I scroll down, I can see that
the name field has been automatically placed on my second page. And then I can just
drag and drop where I want to place that. Now, what I can do is preview my form. And
when I scroll up and I type in the name up here and hit tab, I can scroll down
and see that that name is automatically duplicated on the second page. I'm going
to go ahead and click on "Exit Preview." And I'm going to show you the second way
that you can duplicate or auto populate your fields. I'm going to delete this for now.
And I'm going to come back up and up here, I'm going to go ahead and click on the
three-dot action menu up here. And I'm going to click on "Clear Form." That just
clears the contents when you test your form. You can clear it out. And so now what I want
to do is duplicate by copying and pasting. So all you have to do in Adobe Acrobat Pro
is click on the field that you want to have duplicated or auto populated throughout
the document. Click on "Ctrl+C" to copy it. And then place your cursor where
you want that field to appear. So, I'm going to hit "Ctrl+V" and then drag and
drop. So, I want that name to also appear here. And I can go down here, select, and then
hit "Ctrl+V" and then place that form field. Again, by copying it will also duplicate the
field because if you notice, if we double-click and open the properties of the form field, we
know that it's named "name1." And I can close that out. And when we copy and paste that field
and I double click the property, the name is exactly the same on those additional fields
that I copied and pasted. So that will mean when the user fills in the field up here,
it will populate in those other two fields. So just to show you, we can go
back to preview, type the name in, hit tab, and it's going to populate
automatically. So that's an example of copying and pasting to duplicate
your fields. I'm going to exit my preview again. We're going to come up here
to our three dots and clear the form out. And the third way to do this, and this is going
to be a scenario where you're maybe you already have an existing PDF form with the fields already
built out, and you might have different names for those fields, different properties. So, in
that example, I'm going to come over here, and we're going to be able to duplicate
these fields by using JavaScript. And so in this example, we have our form field
name up here, and that's where we want the user to fill in the name. And we want it to populate
here as well as down here. But notice that the properties for these other two fields are already
set up, and they have a different property name for those fields, which means when a user fills
in the top field, it's not going to auto populate. So what we want to do is create JavaScript that
will automatically populate in these fields. I'm going to double click the field where we want
the name to appear, and I'm going to click on the "Calculate" tab. And over here, I'm going
to click on "Custom Calculate Script" and edit. And this is an example of the code. I'm going
to copy and paste the code in the description below this video so that you can use it. And
what this is saying is that it wants to grab the field that's called "Name1," which
is the name of our first field up here. So if you're going to use this code, you're
going to want to replace what's in between these quotes with the name of the field,
the original field that you want to have populated. And then you're going to replace
this quotes down here with the name of the field where you want that to appear. So in
this case, it's "FirstName." So that's where you're going to update and customize this
code to fit the parameters of your form. Once you have that filled in, you're
going to click "OK" and then close. And then you're going to come down to the
next field that you want to have auto populate with that name. We're going to
double click, go to the "Calculate" tab, click on "Custom Calculation Script," edit. And
in this case, we want that "Name1" to populate "FirstName2," which is the name of the second
field down here that we want to have populate. So once you've got that set up in
there, you're going to click "OK" and you're going to click close. And then when
we preview this form, we'll go up to the top, type in our name, hit tab, and we have
the auto populate feature there using the JavaScript that will populate those
fields depending on your PDF setup. One of these three methods to auto populate form
fields in Adobe PDF forms will work for you. Check out my channel for other videos on how to create
fillable PDF forms. If you found this helpful, be sure and give it a thumbs up and share it with
your friends. You can subscribe to my channel and click the bell to receive a notification every
time I post a new video. Visit my website, SharonSmithHR.com. Thanks so much for
watching, and I'll see you next time.
