Adding form fields in Adobe Acrobat

- [Instructor] Form fields make a PDF file interactive and allow users to digitally enter information into a form so it can be saved and captured for use later on. In this video, we'll add some form fields to this document to make it a fillable form. Now I'm starting here with the 0301 document open. And one of the things I want to stress here is that before you begin making a form fillable, and I'm talking about this in the context of accessibility right now, it's very helpful to make sure that you're working with a well tagged document before you get started. Because if you try to work with form fields and then later try to tag it and get it where it needs to be, it can really be a bit challenging. So rather than complicating things, what you'll find if you open up the tags tree, you will see that the content of this form is well structured, right? Everything is broken into an appropriate tag and everything is tagged appropriately. So I'm starting off with a well tagged document and once you have that, we can start adding form fields. Now to do this, we want to go to our Prepare Form tool. Now, currently I don't have this over here to the right so I'm going to come up here to the upper left of Acrobat and I'm going to click on the Tools tab. And if we scroll down a little bit under Forms and Signatures, you're going to see the Prepare Form tool. So I'm going to go ahead and click add. That's going to add it over here to my tools. And now I could go back to my document and then I'm going to go ahead and click on the Prepare Form button. Now, Adobe Acrobat has a feature called Form Field Auto Detection and what it will do is it will try to evaluate your form and automatically add form fields to that form. Very similar to Auto Tag, your results will often vary, right, depending on the structure of your form. For example, I'm just going to go ahead and click start. I'm going to let it do its thing. And as you can see, this is interesting. It had no idea what to do. It had no idea where to put the form fields in this document. And this is one of the reasons why I really don't use this feature. You'll typically have better success if you've included underlines to indicate where the form fields should go. If you have boxes where you want check boxes and circles where you want radio buttons. I didn't do any of that in this document and that's probably why form Field Auto detection failed okay. So let me, I'm just going to go ahead and revert this to make sure that nothing happened to this form. There we go. And let's go ahead and go to the prepare form mode again. And what I'm going to do is down here where it says Form Field Auto Detection is on, I'm going to click the change link and in my preferences, I am going to uncheck, it's right here, automatically detect form fields. All right, so I'm going to click okay and then we can click the start button. Again, it's not really going to do anything. It's simply going to take me into form mode, all right. Now in the top portion here, I'm going to zoom in to make this a little bit easier to see. In the top portion here these are all of the different form field types that we can use. And we're going to be using this one to start which is the text field. And if you move your cursor down, I'm not dragging, I'm just moving my cursor down, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and click to the right of first name so that it adds a form field at that location. And this little yellow dialogue pops up where I can give the form field an appropriate name. I highly recommend you do this because there's nothing worse than working with form that's called untitled one through 20, right? It's a lot easier when you name your fields appropriately, okay Now what I can also do is I can grab the handle and resize it so that I can resize my field to an appropriate size. And then I'm going to double click on this to bring up the text field properties. Now you'll notice there's a bunch of tabs up here at the top. We have Appearance, we have Positions, so on and so forth. In the Appearance tab you could choose what font you want to use in the form field and what size you want to use. Position could be helpful if you're trying to accurately position this. The rest of these are just, you know various options that you can add to your form field. So I'm going to go ahead and close this. And I'm a big fan of not doing extra work. One of the things I might do before I continue is click on the preview button here. And in the first name field, I'm just going to go ahead and type my name so I can see what this looks like relative to the text. And you know, I think that looks pretty good. So I'm going to go ahead and delete that. And then I'll go ahead and click on the edit button to go back into edit mode. Now, what we could do to save some time, right, because I've already set this field the way that I want it to be. I set my appearance, I set the font, and I want all of these form fields to be the same. So if you hold down your Control key on Windows or your Alt key on Mac, and you drag to the right as you drag, you can add the shift key to constrain the position to the original. And when you let go it's going to make a copy of that form field, okay? And you could certainly resize it to the size that you want. But very important when you have two form fields that have the same name, if you fill in one, the other one is going to get populated with the same information. So we want to double click on this one and change the name to last name. So now we could kind of keep using that technique. I'm going to Control or Alt drag to add another form field. And so what I may want to do, I'm going to delete this, I may want to double click on this, go to the position. What I could do is adjust the height. Maybe I'll go with like 0.25. Maybe I'll even... I think that'll work. 0.25 looks pretty good. I'll do the same thing to this one. Because when I made that original copy, it was overlapping. So let's try this again. So if I make a copy, I think that'll work. That'll work okay. So then I can resize this, you know where I want it to be. And we'll double click on this and we'll call this one address. Okay, I can leave this open. I don't have to, you know keep closing and reopening it. I can make a copy of this while that is open, right? So I can just adjust this and this one will be city. And I'll make another copy over here for the zip code. Now, for certain form fields, what I may want to do here you'll notice up here we have a list of choices or we have a dropdown list. And so when it comes to state, what I may want to do is create a dropdown that includes the states. So the way this works is if you go to your options tab you can add the items that you want in this list, right? So I could type in here, California. I can type Pennsylvania, New Hampshire. I'll just do a couple of 'em. Down here at the bottom we can sort them if we want. And that if you don't want one of these values to be the default just click in the empty area down here and that way it will no longer be the default, right? So again, I'm going to make a copy of this for the daytime phone number. Again, just kind of giving appropriate name as I do this. And then one last one for our email address. And you get the idea. We could highlight all of these and align them to the right if we wanted to to kind of make sure they're all lined up really nicely. But you get the idea. Now down here, and this is where I always love to make a point about difference between check boxes and radio buttons. Because whenever they say choose all that apply that is always going to be a checkbox, right? So for this one, the default box is a little bit big, so I'm going to make it a little bit smaller and I'm going to call this one landscape design. And then you can double click on it if you want to. We can go to position if you want to make sure the height and width is exactly the same. You can make them both 0.2, right? And then we can kind of, I'm going to have to zoom in a little bit more, there we go, so I can position this. That looks pretty good. So again, we can just kind of Control or Alt drag, make a copy. And actually I'll show you a little trick that's even better than that. If you actually, I'm going to rename this to something generic like checkbox, okay? And then what you could do is if you right click on this field I can choose the option that says create multiple copies. And so what I'll do is I'll say give me three copies down and two across. And then if you come in here to the height field I can use my up arrow key to increase the distance. And then if I go to the width I can use my up arrow key and basically make a copy of these all the way over here, right? And when I'm done, I end up with all six check boxes created at once. And the reason I made the name generic originally is because what it does is it appends a digit at the end. And so now what I can do is change this one to say landscape design. And with check boxes, if you go to the options tab the export value is yes, and that makes sense. And then moving down a bit, this is where we only have one choice, right? And whenever you have this situation the field type is going to be a radio button because radio buttons are mutually exclusive which means that only one choice can be made. So when you create a radio button you're going to have two options to choose. We have a group name. So I'm going to call the group name installation. And then the choice is going to be do it yourself, right? I'm going to double click on this. Go to position. Yeah, I'm just going to make these same size here. There we go. If I wanted to, I could do a create multiple copies. But there's only three of 'em so I'm just going to kind of Control drag. Control drag, or if I'm on a Mac Option drag. And with a radio button, the name of the field is the same for all of them, but what changes is the option, right? The radio button choice is what is unique between the choices. So I'm just going to put here L and M Contractors and then this one will be not sure, okay. And then I have one more field down here where they're giving you a space for like a note. I'm going to create another text field down here. I'm just going to kind of click and drag, do something like that. Now for this one, I'll call this note. But because we're asking for a lot more information if you go to the options tab we could turn on this option called Multi-line. And what that does is when they're filling it out the text will wrap within that field to multiple lines. So we have now added all the form fields to this form that we need. Using the Prepare Form tool you can add a variety of different form field types to a document to allow users to fill out the form digitally and preserve that information for future use.