View Single Post
  #1   Report Post  
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.newusers
JLatham JLatham is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,203
Default How do I make editable PDF forms using Excel?

How odd, I just mentioned "Pro" because it happens to be the product version
that I myself own and that we have where I work. I didn't realize that the
Standard version doesn't have that ability. Just went to the Adobe site and
did a product feature comparison and lo and behold, you can't do what I was
thinking of until you get to the Pro version. At least the MSRP upgrade
price is 'only' $159, and you can probably get it cheaper on line somewhere
like BuyCheapSoftware.com or AtomicPark.com

You might look at this page:
http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_g...t+professional
and get an idea of available pricing. Some of the vendors listed on that
page that I know from personal experience to be reputable (not saying any of
the others aren't, but I haven't bought from all of them) are
AtomicPark, PageComputer, NewEgg, TechOnWeb, TigerDirect, BuyCheapSoftware,
and the national names, of course. The best price there is from
RoyalDiscount.com at $140, and I would expect them to be reputable since they
are a "featured merchant" at Pricegrabber. But you could double-check them
at ResellerRatings.com to see about quality of service overall.


"Haplo" wrote:

thanks for the help.
I will try the screenshot workaround as it seems like the closest thing to
what we want. I'm not sure why we don't have Adobe Pro (we have Adobe
Standard) because clearly we want the extra functionality. Oh well.

Thank you very much for the advice!

Haplo.

"JLatham" wrote:

Haplo,
Having given the bad news about Excel and turning it into editable .pdf form
a moment ago, let me offer a work-around.

If you can get a screen shot of your Excel registration form, you can save
that as a .gif or .jpg and then insert it into a Word document as a picture
from file. Then format the picture to be Behind Text. Then set up the
fields on top of the picture in appropriate locations so that it appears to
the user like a .pdf with editable fields. By the way, this trick works in
Access reports also.

There are some good tools for grabbing such screen shots. One free one that
I've always liked is PrintKey 2000 v5.10 available for download at
http://www.webtree.ca/newlife/printkey_info.htm that's the last free version
of that program. Another excellent free one is IrfanView available from
www.irfanview.com and if you want to get a great one and are willing to pay,
I recommend SnagIt from www.TechSmith.com


"Haplo" wrote:

First off let me say I apologize for not keeping my Microsoft Office skills
up to par. I just spent a few hours making a very nice-looking, printable
member registration form using Excel. Unfortunately, I now want to be able to
convert it to PDF, and make it so that the answer fields are editable in the
PDF. ...but don't see how. Is there a way to do that using Excel? (I suppose
my first problem is that I need help inserting editable form fields into
excel worksheets? It seems to me I used to be able to do that, but I have
completely forgotten to do that. I can in Word...but copying and pasting to
Word only ruins my otherwise lovely registration form. Should I be
'exporting' or something?).

Thanks