The IRS uses adobe pdf forms for all of its forms. Is there anyway to
convert them so that you can insert excel formulas and save them as an
excel file? Why you ask?

1. Excel is much smaller and faster.
2. The forms, as they exist, will autopopulate Social Security numbers
and names, but will not calculate simple addition.
3. In short, I prepare a lot of taxes for small business and find myself
filling out the same forms over and over - most of the formulas are
simple, but even if I fill out the formula in a separate spreadsheet, it
takes a long time to tab through the IRS pdf forms.

Any ideas? I can copy the graphics as picture files and import them into
excel, but am at a loss to then take these graphics and add a formula. I
have Adobe Professional 8 and Excel 2007. All the conversion programs I
have found do a poor job of preserving the appearance. (Scan to pdf, and
others.)

If this is impossible, is there a way I can design a questionaire that
asks questions - puts the answers into an excel spreadsheet and then
exports them to the IRS forms? Sort of like: what was your income ______
what is your social security income ______ and have excel import /
calculate / and then auto-populate the pdf for printing?

any tips are appreciated.

"pgluth1" wrote...
The IRS uses adobe pdf forms for all of its forms. Is there anyway to
convert them so that you can insert excel formulas and save them as an
excel file? Why you ask?

It's possible to mimick IRS forms in Excel, but it's not possible to convert
PDF files into XLS files. It's a mostly manual process.

1. Excel is much smaller and faster.
....

Than Acrobat Readed? Wrong.

If this is impossible, is there a way I can design a questionaire that
asks questions - puts the answers into an excel spreadsheet and then
exports them to the IRS forms? Sort of like: what was your income ______
what is your social security income ______ and have excel import /
calculate / and then auto-populate the pdf for printing?

There are commercial (meaning you pay for them) Excel templates at least for
personal returns. There may be commercial Excel templates for business
returns. However, unless Acrobat Professional provides a programmable object
model, there's no way to script data transfer from Excel to Acrobat easily.
It may be possible to use generic keyboard/mouse macro packages to mimick
copy from Excel/paste into Acrobat operations, but that sort of programming
is tricky - you'd need to work with positions on screen rather than logical
positions in documents.

It's possible to mimick IRS forms in Excel, but it's not possible to
convert PDF files into XLS files. It's a mostly manual process.


I'm up for manual processes - If I cut pieces of the pdf and copy them to
excel, how do I insert separate excel tables / columns? (since most forms
are text / graphics on one side - simple addition columns on the other - )

In terms of being smaller and faster - my goal is to take a number of
single sheet forms (not the full 1040) and combine them into a series of
tabs in one spreadsheet - and that would be smaller than individually
loading 5 or 6 pdf files.

Thanks for your response before - if anything, you have me intrigued.