A good way to make a form is to use Excel, Word, and Acrobat Pro together. Excel can be used to create the tables for the form fields, and Word can be used to hold those tables and print the form. Then Acrobat can be used to make an online fillable and savable form.

To get a good idea of how your form should be created open up a form template like the one you would like to make. You can get an idea of how you would compose your form. You can also look at the other forms we have, or look online for a similar form. Make sure you know all of the information that needs to go into the form before you start your form.

The first step in creating a form is to plan out your form. Draw a sketch of your form, and figure out the width of your fields that you will use. You can also figure out the height of your fields. Remember that a piece of paper is 8.5” x 11” in portrait view, and 11” x 8.5” in landscape view. Also remember that you would want a margin on your form of at least 0.5” to 1”.

Take for example the Schedule Change Form:

The paper is 8 ½” wide

The margin is ½”x 2 sides = 1”

Therefore the content is taking up 7 ½”

We can see the fields that we need in our form, and we can start to plan it out:

“TO: OFFICE OF INSTRUCTION (whitespace)” takes up about 4” and the “FROM:” takes about 1” and the fillable part“______” takes up about 2 ½”

Do not worry about the height of the rows, they can be readjusted later.

Such as the second row will have “SEMESTER/YEAR” is about 1 ½” the fillable part “______” is about 1 ½”, and the “SECTION NUMBER” is about 2” and the fillable part “_____” is about 2”

After sketching the form and figuring out the widths of your fields; all of the row heights will be the same, ½”. Now you will use Excel to make the table fields for your form.

Excel is an excellent table making tool, and it is easy to make your tables in Excel. By making them tables it will be easy to copy and paste these in Word.

First you will set up the columns in Excel to equal ½”, and then you will be able to use the columns as a ruler.

Remember these dimensions for your Excel column widths:

An approximate conversion of points and pixels to inches is shown in the following table.

POINTS / PIXELS / INCHES
18 / 24 / .25
36 / 48 / .5
72 / 96 / 1
108 / 144 / 1.5
144 / 192 / 2

Drag your column widths to 0.5” increments, or 48 pixels each. You can use Page Layout View by pressing the button in the bottom right-hand corner, and this will let you see the ruler at the top of the screen:

So for our form, we have a portrait oriented document that is a normal paper width of 8 ½” width. It has a ½” margin so our content is 7 ½”. We will need to use 15 columns that are ½” in width because 7 ½” is 15 – ½” inch increments. So 15 columns is columns A-O. We select these columns and make them ½” or 48 pixels in width:

Another example if you are making a landscape form, with 0.5” margins, you have 10” for your content (11”-1/2”-1/2” = 10”). Make 20 Excel columns have a width of 36 points (which is ½”), and you will have 10 inches. Every column is one half inch. So you would make columns A-T have a width of 36 points.

If you wanted to make a document that had 1” margins then you would have: 8 ½” – (1” * 2) = 6 ½”

So you would use 13 columns.

A good row height is 40 pixels, but this can be easily changed.

Remember that if we make more than one row in a table we would want a skinny divider row in-between these two rows….to provide spacing.

Use the format painter button to copy and paste the formatting from the 2 formatted rows into the other rows.

Now since we have already thought about the layout for our form, it will be easy to make the table for our form with the fields in it. Make therow that has: “TO: OFFICE OF INSTRUCTION (whitespace)” takes up about 4” and the “FROM:” takes about 1” and the fillable part “______” takes up about 2 ½”.

Use merge and center to get the correct width for your fields.

So for the first field with “OFFICE OF INSTRUCTION, which is 4”, that is 8 columns – just count every column as ½” and that means every 2 columns are an inch.

Size the second field in that row, “FROM:”, to be 1” – 2 columns-, and the fillable part“______” will be 2 ½” or the last 5 columns. Use Merge and Center, and then left align the cells.

Put your text into the place where the text should go, and then use a bottom border for the fillable part.

Once you make a table in Excel, you can copy and paste it into Word where it would go in the form.

Or you can make your entire form in Excel. If you do, make sure to leave a row of space (about 11 pixels) in between the form rows. See picture below.

The benefit of using Word is so you can use features in Word to put space under the tables, or other things in your form like logos or textboxes.

You get the beauty of tables in Excel and the ease of editing in Word.

For the form we just made unfortunately it does not paste well into a Word document. This tells us something  tables that have lots of different sized merge cells are considered “complex” by Word, and it has a hard time converting a table that is “complex” into a Word table. Simple tables there is no problem – but “complex” tables will not paste correctly. So if you have a “complex” table you might just have to leave it in Excel and not paste it into a Word document. In this case you would have to make the entire form in Excel.

So for our form we have the following:

Save the form and close it. The document has to be closed in order to make it into an online form using Adobe Acrobat Pro X.

Now let’s take the form and make an online pdf fillable form using Adobe Acrobat Pro X.

In Adobe Acrobat choose “Create Form”, then choose “From existing Document”, and choose your form you just made in Excel.

The form opens in form editing mode. If a field is missing you can add it in using the buttons on the right. If a field name is incorrect you can double-click to edit the name, or right-click on the field name on the right to change its name.

You can “Distribute” this form via email. When you do you will want your users to be able to open it, fill it out, save it, and then send it back to you via a Submit button that emails it – or emails it to someone else. Or the user can fill it out and save it to their computer and then just attach it to an email.

To do this you will save the form in Adobe Acrobat X as an ER type document.

You can do this by choosing “Distribute” from the menu. Save the form with a new name. Such as if your form is called ScheduleChangeForm.pdf, you would name the distributed form ScheduleChangeForm_ER.pdf or ScheduleChangeForm_distributed.pdf

Choose to Distribute and then choose to email it:

Then you can save a local copy to your computer. A new version of the form will be saved, and this is the form you will use. You can then post that form on Sharepoint, or email it as an attachment to someone. They can fill it out and hit the submit button that is created automatically and it will email back to you.

Here are some online direction for this:

If you want to the form to be sent to someone other than the default email that is saved in Adobe Acrobat Pro X with that purple automatically created Submit button, you will have to change the Identity in Adobe Acrobat Pro X before you complete the Distribute steps.

To change your Identity go to Edit  Preferences  Identity:

And change the Identity to the email you would like the form to go to – if it is more than one person separate the emailsusing ;semicolons;

Then go through the steps by hitting the Distribute button as described above.

Another way tohave them email you the form is to make a separate “Submit” button in Adobe Acrobat X. To do this you would use the “Button” Tool at the top right Edit bar to draw a button on your form. Name the button and look at its Properties – you can always look at the Properties of a button by double-clicking on it. In the Actions tab you can choose “Submit a Form”. In the box that opens choose the “Add” button, and then in the url type: mailto: – of course you would put your own email, or list of emails separated by semicolons “;”.

Here is a link to some online documentation that explains this:

Let’s try another form. A form that has fewer fields and these fields are spaced further apart. This form is a good candidate to use MS Word to make the form and then Excel to make the tables in the form. We will make the “Compensation for First Time Teaching Online Classes” form.

This form has fewer fields.

It has more text that are not fields.

We will use Word for the text, and Excel to make our fields.

Let’s make the rectangle that is in the header of the document.

Choose Insert  Shapes Rounded Rectangle

Add text to the rectangle by typing with the rectangle selected. If you want to copy and paste text to your rectangle  select your rectangle, press the space bar once to get into Text Edit mode, and then you can paste the text in the text box. Make your rectangle look like this:

You can add it to the header by selecting your rectangle, cutting it (Ctrl+X), then double click in your header, and then paste it (Ctrl+V) in your header.

You can add the footer the same way:

Add text to your document for the paragraph that comes next:

Memorandum of Understanding dated May 31, 2011 relating to Distance Education, indicates, “A professor who has never taught using the appropriate technology or had appropriate training in teaching distance education is awarded a stipend of $850 for the initial instruction of a course that is either an experimental or permanent course. The stipend will be paid at the end of the semester the professor taught the class.”

REQUEST

Then we need some form like tables. Now we will use Excel to make these.

We make the columns size 0.5” like before. The rows we make about size 26 pixels for the top row and 17 pixels for the skinnier row. We format the 2 rows the same in regards to the merged cells.

We can then copy and paste these to our Word document. Now make the rest of the document in Word. When you need some form fields make them as a table using Excel.

*If Word pastes your table incorrectly*

Sometimes Word will readjust the Excel table and then paste it wrong – especially if it is a large or “complex” table. One way to “fix” this is  you can first paste it as “Link & Keep Source Formatting” using the Paste Special options (the arrow under the Paste button). After pasting it special  select the table in Word, copy it again, and paste it to another Word doc. Strangely this then pastes it correctly, and it will not be linked to the Excel table.

Another way to “fix” your tables:

Sometimes you might have to change the Table Properties so that it pastes correctly.

Click on the Table, then go to the LAYOUT tab.

Choose Table Properties on the left.

(Or you can right-click your table and choose Properties)

In Table Properties choose Options…

Make sure the default cell margins are 0.

Make sure the “Automatically resize to fit contents” is Unchecked.

Another thing that will “fix” your table width is to check the Preferred Width and make it the width of the content – 7.5”

You can import you Word document in Adobe Acrobat X the same way as before and make it into a Distributable form  Good Luck and Happy Form building!