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bryanb32652650
Participant
April 27, 2016
Question

Hidden fields not exporting when document is signed

  • April 27, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 275 views

Hello everyone,

I work for a community college print shop and we have been fighting to bring more graphic design and print production in-house rather than having our Marketing group send it to outside sources. Most recently we brought in business cards and they are working out great for the most part.

Typically, other local colleges and universities have what's called a "Store Front" which allows for simple jobs like business cards to be typed into a template and it handles most of the work for them. However, due to our limited budget, I have been developing an order form that allows for someone to fill out the information, send it to myself, and then I can export that data to an Excel Spreadsheet that I can data merge into a template in InDesign. Little by little we have added to this form to allow for less mistakes and mishaps on the user side, but the most recent change has left me stumped.

I have 4 hidden fields which are designated: 'Street', 'City', 'State', and 'Zip'. The way that the form works is that you select a drop down option for the campus you are on, it auto fills the 4 hidden fields with the address for that campus, and when I export it to Excel it recognizes the hidden fields and puts it into separate columns. It was working great until the document receives a digital signature and now it doesn't recognize the hidden fields (or it doesn't populate into the Excel document) and I can't edit the form to check if the fields are still there because it's been signed.

Any thoughts or solutions would be greatly appreciated. I've only started forms in the past couple of months.

Thanks much.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

G
George_Johnson
Inspiring
April 27, 2016

Why are the form being digitally signed? Are they actual digital signatures or e-signatures?

B
bryanb32652650Author
Participant
April 28, 2016

Sorry about the confusion, it's an e-signature. The purpose of the e-signature is for Marketing to approve the order. The process goes like this:

  1. Customer fills out the form and gives it to their supervisor.
  2. Supervisor uses an e-signature to approve the order and then sends it to a representative in Marketing.
  3. Marketing reviews the information and quantity requested, fixes errors, and then uses an e-signature to approve and send it to  the Print Shop.
  4. Print Shop takes form(s) and exports the data to an Excel spreadsheet.
  5. Print Shop saves Excel spreadsheet in UTF-16 Unicode Text (.txt).
  6. Print Shop data merges all of the cards into the template in InDesign.

From there it's just saving under templates and printing. The purpose of the e-signature is to approve the cards for ordering since Marketing can see the supervisor approval and when it arrives at the shop, we see both signatures and know who can and cannot approve the orders.

If there are any further questions, please feel free to ask.

Thanks much.

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