Skip to main content
H
HelloJoe
Participant
October 4, 2017
Question

Editing a field automatically fills out the others

  • October 4, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 3968 views

Hey there,

I looked up the internet first to have my issue solved, but I can't find any suitable threads nor do I have the right tags to google.

My problem is as follows: I'm opening up a pdf file in Adobe Reader DC which is an employment certificate. it has five columns - one for each day - and my employer wants me to fill it out electronically. So I type something into the monday's column, and after I am finished, the whole Monday's text appears in the other four columns identically. Now, if I want to edit the Tuesday's text, the Monday's text is edited too!

I hope you get the problem. I tried many things from the Internet, but nothing helped so far.

I'm using Adobe Reader DC, the pdf file is of version 1.6 (Acrobat 7.x), created by a MacOS X 10.12.6 Quartz PDFContext.

Any help is highly aprreciated, as a MS Word conversion tends to kill the formatting

    2 replies

    try67
    Community Expert
    try67Community Expert
    Community Expert
    June 1, 2025

    The person who posted this video is basically stealing my identity. His name is extremely similar to mine (on purpose) and he's selling scripts that do exactly the same as those I've created much before him. I know who he is, but won't dox him here.

     

    Anyway, that video won't solve this problem for people with Reader. It's based on the user having Acrobat, where it can be easily fixed, but not in Reader, as I've stated above.

    ~graffiti
    ~graffiti
    Legend
    October 4, 2017

    More than likely, the creator of the file has done this. What happens is, when they add the form fields, they copy/pasted the first one to make the others. Therefore all of the fields have the same name/ID. By design, when you fill out a field, all fields with the same name/ID fill out with the same information. Whomever created the file needs to go back and give all those fields different names. You could do it yourself if you were using the full version of Acrobat but if you are only using the free Acrobat Reader, you can't change those.

    H
    HelloJoeAuthor
    Participant
    October 5, 2017

    Thanks for your reply, this helps me a lot I was wondering if I missed some command or failed to check a certain box in the properties menu.

    If I may ask: Which version of Acrobat should I purchase then? Is AC XI Standard enough or do I have to use the Pro version (I'm just being curious now)?

    try67
    Community Expert
    try67Community Expert
    Community Expert
    October 5, 2017

    Any version of Acrobat can do it.

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices