Hi Everyone! This is Sharon, and today I'm going
to show you how to create interactive fillable PDF forms in Adobe Acrobat. We'll cover how
to create a new PDF form in Adobe Acrobat from scratch, or from a Word document. Then we'll
add PDF fillable form Fields like text boxes, drop-down lists and check boxes. Then we're going
to cover some more advanced fillable form making techniques in Adobe Acrobat Pro like setting up
calculating form fields and using action buttons to reset your form. You can use these same methods
on both Mac and PC let's take a look. First let's open Adobe Acrobat. I have a license to use
Adobe Acrobat Pro through my Creative Cloud account so I have the acrobat desktop app
downloaded to my computer. Click on tools and if you want to create your form from scratch
click here on Prepare Form. Select Create New and click Start. The Prepare Form toolbar will
appear and you can hover over each icon to see a description. You can start adding your form fields
to create your form here from scratch. Now you may be more familiar with Word or Google Docs so
you can create your form template there and then bring it into Acrobat to make it into a PDF form.
Acrobat can intuitively place form fields into the document automatically when you upload, saving
you a lot of time. Let's pull up our Ford form and in our example today we're using a job offer
approval form. Let's save our Word form as a PDF. Go up to file, click Save as Adobe PDF. Choose
a file name and location and then click Save. Our form gets saved as a PDF that
we can then upload in Acrobat. Notice that it opened up a new tab with our PDF
out here. Let's go ahead and close these two tabs and go back to Tools and click Prepare Form. This time we're going to leave Single File
selected and click on Select a file. Navigate where you saved your PDF form,
select it and click Open. In a few minutes your document will load here and notice that the
form field auto-detection is ON. Let's click Start. I'm going to zoom out so you can see the form
fields. Now we can see that the form field auto-detection did a pretty good job of placing
our form fields for us but it placed the form fields as Text Box type fields, so now we want
to make a few edits to include checkboxes and drop-down lists. Notice that each form field
is also named automatically. Let's add checkboxes to the FLSA Status area. Click on the
checkboxes icon in the Prepare Form toolbar. A highlighted box appears on your mouse
cursor and you can move your mouse where you want to place the checkbox and click to
place it. The checkbox properties window will open and you can name your checkbox. We'll
name this ExemptCheck. Click on all properties and notice that you can also add a Tooltip as
well as set the Common Properties to Required, and also check the appearance and make any
updates to the style of the border, color fill, line thickness, or style that you like. These
options are available on all the form fields. When you're done making your edits, click Close.
One important thing to note about PDF fillable form fields is the field I added now displays at
the end of this list on the right side panel. We want to move this field up under Job Grade so that
a user who's tabbing through the form fields will be able to tab through the fields in the correct
order. We arrange that order over here. Simply click hold and drag the field up and release
where you want to place it in the right order. Now let's place another checkbox over here
for the non-exempt item. We'll click on the checkbox icon, move our cursor down and place
our check box. We'll name this NonexemptCheck. Click on all properties, make any adjustments that
we want and click Close. Now let's select our form field over here and use our arrow buttons to
place it exactly where we want it to display in the form. Now let's align our form Fields. I can
click my mouse drag and select both fields then go over to the right hand panel at the top where we
can align, center, match size, or distribute. We're going to click on Align Horizontally. Notice
that the checkboxes are now evenly placed. Let's delete this extra FLSA status checkbox
that was automatically placed into the PDF. All we have to do is click it and hit Delete.
Now let's say we want to create a drop-down list for the Department.
Let's delete the current text field by selecting and hitting Delete and then go
up to the Prepare Form toolbar and select the drop-down list icon. Click on it and then bring
your mouse down where we want to place the field and click. We'll name this Department
DropDown and then click on all properties. On the Tooltip let's type Select Department. Now
let's click on the Appearance tab and make any desired updates to your field then click on the
Options tab and this is where we'll enter the drop-down list items. I'm going to type the department
names in the item field and click Add for each one. In the item list area you can delete
a list item, or move it up or down. You also have some enhanced features to
consider like allowing spell check, allowing users to enter custom text, or even selecting
a default item. When you're done click Close. Let's drag our field out to extend it and
then let's align it and make it the same size as our other fields. I'm going to click
and drag my mouse to select the field below it and then I'm going to come over and click on
Match Size this will match the width and height. Now our box will look even and be visually
pleasing to our users. Remember to drag the fields that we created up on the list
and place them in the correct order. Now let's update the Properties on our
Date form field at the top. Double-click to open the Date form field properties
window and click on the Format tab. Drop-down the Select Format category and
select Date. Select your desired date format, and then click Close. Now let's scroll down. We have
a field down here called Other and we want to make this a multi-line in case users have more data to
type into this field. Let's double-click to open the properties window, click on the Options tab and
select the Multi-line checkbox then click Close. Now we can even create calculating form fields.
Let's say we want users to enter the annual salary, and then have the hourly rate field auto-calculate.
First we need to update the properties on both so that we can rename them so there are no spaces in
the name and then we will select Number type for both. So let's double-click and open Base Annual
Salary, go to the General tab and we'll rename this AnnualSalary with no spaces. Then we're
going to go to the Format tab, select Number. We can use two decimal places, and then
select the dollar sign as our currency symbol, then click Close. Now for the hourly rate let's
go ahead and select the Number and the currency symbol will default automatically.
Now let's go ahead on to Calculate since this is the field we want to set for calculation.
We're going to click Simplified Field Notation and click Edit. We're going to type the syntax of
our formula here. It's going to be open parentheses, AnnualSalary which is the name of our other field
that we want to calculate / divided by 2080, so it's the annual salary divided by 2080 to derive the
hourly rate and close parentheses, and click OK. Now we're going to click Close. Now let's
add a Clear Form or Reset button at the bottom of our form so we can reuse the
form quickly. I'm going to scroll down and then I'm going to come up here to the
Prepare Form toolbar and click the Button icon. We're going to move our mouse and
click where we want to place the Button. We'll name this ResetForm. Click on all properties. We can put a Tooltip here, check our appearance,
positioning, options, and here's where we want to put our label: Reset Form. And now we're going to
click on Actions. The trigger will be Mouse up and the Select Action scroll
down and select Reset a Form. Click Add, and here on the Select
Fields to Reset we can select only certain fields to clear and reset or
leave all selected and then click OK. When you're done click Close. Now let's Preview our form and test it
out! Come up here to Preview and click. Let's scroll up and if we put a date in here, and hit tab, it'll give us a warning that
this is an invalid format type and it'll warn users to put the correct formatting.
We'll click OK and re-enter our date. Then we can logically tab through each
of our form fields in the correct order. We can select our drop-down. And let's test our calculation.
here we'll put in a base salary, hit tab, and hit tab again, and it will display
in the correct format. Now we can scroll down, we can choose the multi-line and see that the
scroll bars appear, and we can click on Reset Form and it clears the form out. This looks
pretty good! Let's go ahead and click on Edit, and now we can go ahead and
save our form. Go to File Save As, select a location, name your file, and click
Save. Now your form is ready to send out. Be sure to thoroughly test your form before posting
or sending it out to ensure that it works as desired. If you like this video be sure and give
it a thumbs up and share it! To see more helpful videos be sure and Subscribe to my Channel and
click the Bell to receive a notification whenever I post a new video. You can visit my website
SharonSmithHR.com and don't forget to check out my YouTube Community post page. Thank you
so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.
