Adobe Acrobat DC is the newest version on Acrobat, as of April 2018 when I as writing this. You can download a trial version of it, but is is only for 7 days. You can get a month-to-month subscription for about USD $24.99. There are other plans available, such as annual prepaid which is USD $179.88 per year. This is about $15 per month. For more information click here. At this site there is a post on Forms using the Acrobat Pro 9 version.

Let’s start with a Microsoft Word file that I prepared to illustrate how Adobe processes it into a form. First, create a Word file. Next, export it to a PDF. Do thin within Word itself. Next. open up Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and on the right hand side there is a menu that you can use to work with your document. Once you have opened the PDF in Acrobat, click Prepare Form.

Here on the right is a screenshot of the original Word file. Create your own Word files and try this yourself.

Our Word file is easy to create but there are a few things to do and not do in order for things to go smoothly when Acrobat automatically creates a PDF form for you. You can use underlines or boxes (including tables) to let Acrobat know that these are areas where the use will need to fill in their data. Do not create any check boxes or radio buttons in Word. I found they didn’t work anyway. We need to add those manually.

It is recommended to do most of your work in Word, or some other program that can export to a PDF. Making a lot of text, layout and content changes in Acrobat is more difficult than it is in Word. I recommend preparing all of your tables in Word rather than in Acrobat. Tables with lines in Word (or Excel) are converted to text and graphic lines. In Acrobat you cannot just grab a table edge and resize it. In Acrobat you will be working with horizontal and vertical lines that are all separate and appear to be attached to each other only because they are touching.

There are some things to do to finish working on the form, as you can see from the comments I made on the screenshot. Acrobat has names for all of the controls (text boxes, radio buttons, check boxes and so on) and Adobe automatically recognizes those names and uses them to name the controls. That saves you a lot of work. Properly naming controls will be important when you export the data.