Distributing a form in Adobe

Distributing a form allows you to:

Manage a list of form recipients
Send the form from Adobe
Easily collect all submissions into one location
See a list of all recipients and their submission status
Collect responses into a list exportable to excel
Email all recipients or just those who haven’t responded

Overview of steps:

Create a fillable form in Adobe Acrobat.
Distribute form.
Recipients complete and submit form.
Receive submissions and add to a response file. You can now manage all responses and communications from that file.

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Call Center can assist you in creating your form. Use the Adobe Form Creation/Update service request.

Here are some best practice tips.

File location of the completed form is important in this process. You will end up with three files that work together and you should put some thought to where they will reside:
- Original pdf - your blank form
- Distributable pdf - This is the form you email recipients. It has code linking it to your original form and your email.
- Response pdf - This is a pdf that compiles the data from all of your submissions.
Consider saving the form in a shared drive if a team will be working on it.
Is the form something you'll use year after year? If you will be delivering the form by email you won't need dates on the form, as you'll be able to put custom instructions in the email body.

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Here you will create your distributed.pdf file.

Distribute the form. In the Prepare Tool choose the Distribute button at the bottom. You’ll be prompted to save.
Save the form in the same folder you saved the original form.
Choose the delivery method you will use to distribute the form. Most will use Email.
Choose how you want to distribute your form.
1. Send using Adobe Acrobat – this will allow you to track and manage recipients and responses
2. Save a local copy and manually send it later - this will create the same distributed.pdf that you can distribute it by email, website or a shared drive.
Configure your email, fields can be customized.
1. To - Enter a list of emails, separated by a semi-colon. You can also use the To: button to access your default email (Outlook) address book.
2. Subject
3. Message – if you customize this it will save.
4. Collect name & email from recipients to provide optimal tracking – Check this, it will collect email and name from submissions, even those that come from sources outside this original email. (Ex. You post the form on your website; data from those who download and submit will be collected in the response tracking.)
5. Click Send and you will see a progress bar while the response file is created.
Once complete you will see a Tracker Window pop up.
1. Distributed – Each form you distribute will be in this list.
2. View Responses – Once you have submissions you can click here to see a list view.
3. Response File Location – This is the location you chose earlier. It is also where you can edit the location if needed later.
4. Open Original Form – This will open the distributable version of the form.
5. Responses Section – You will see the list of emails you entered in step 6.
  1. You can see that Mary has not yet responded.
  2. See that you send all recipients an reminder email from here. Or only the Recipients who haven’t responded.
  3. You can Add Recipients and send a new email. This will just append the recipients list, it will not remove any from an earlier email.
If you navigate to the folder where you saved the distributed form you should see your original form and two others. If you do move the location of this folder you can adjust the path in the program later but know that it is easiest to leave everything where it is to avoid future issues.

MyForm_distributed.pdf – this is your original form with additional code that allows it to be submitted back to you easily.
MyForm_responses.pdf – this is the data from all the forms your recipients submit.

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Recipients will get an email like below inviting them to complete the from. They will simply:

Open the attachment to access the form.
Complete the form. The Highlight Existing Fields button is helpful to make the fillable fields more visible.
Click Submit Form.
They may get a prompt asking if you want to use your computer’s default email program, they should say yes.
They will add their Email Address and Full Name and Send.

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You will receive an email with the form submission as an attachment.

Open the attachment
Click OK and the response will be added to your MyFile_responses.pdf.
MyFile_responses.pdf - Adobe Acrobat will open and you’ll see
1. A notification that 1 new response(s) added.
2. A welcome message with the tasks you can do. You can dismiss this message at the bottom right so it will not show next time.
3. Click Get Started.
4. Now you should see all of your responses listed. Mary has responded twice. Ima Counselor also responded; we didn’t email her, but she downloaded the form off of the website and submitted it. From here you can:
  1. Update – not used on email based forms
  2. Filter – allows you to filter for any field. Here I filtered for PHS.
  3. Export – Export all records, or selected records to .csv to use in Excel.
  4. Arvchive - Archive all records, or selected records. This creates a new archive file in the same folder location and moves those responses to it.
  5. Add – If you have a completed form from someone who didn’t email it you can add it here. It will come in as an anonymous user with no email capabilities.
  6. Delete – Delete records
  7. Adobe icons - click on the icon for each record and it will open a PDF version of the response.
  8. Tracker Link – This toggles you back to the Tracker Veiw.