Detecting Form Fields in Acrobat Std 2020

[DNATech]

Hi!  Thanks for taking the time to read.  I've imported an Excel spreadsheet into Acrobat Standard 2020.  Per the screenshot below, you can see that some form fields were automatically detected.  I'm trying to get the rows below those to be detected, though:  "Date 1, To Whom Paid 1" etc.  Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?  I can't seem to find a tool that will make those rows and columns automatically fillable.   

[ls_rbls]

I am under the impression that you did the export from MS Excel using the PDF Maker add-in.

Can you confirm if this is the method that you used?

I would create the file in MS Excel but instead of using the PDF Maker add-in, open it directly in Acrobat and let Acrobat handle the conversion to PDF automatically.  

You may also want to got to Edit--->>Preferences--->> "Convert To PDF"  and edit some settings there.

See slide:

And just to be sure that everything will work smoothly after the file export, a good rule of thumb is to inspect the document in MS Excel using the Accessibility Checker.

You can use this tool to check for the type of fonts used in your spreadsheet, conditional formatting, and most importantly wrapped text.

This will allow you to deternine if certain type of fonts will  be embedded  during the export to PDF and avoid alternate text and other unexpected issues, for examlpe.

In MS Excel , click on "File" and refer to the slide below:

See next slide:

[try67]

There's no simple way of doing it. What you can do is create the fields in the first row manually and then duplicate them to the other rows (right-click each one in Prepare Form mode and select Create Multiple Copies).

Another option is to use a script to detect them more accurately, but that is tricky as it needs to use some textual clues to do it, and it can't know where the border of each cell in your table is located. So, for example, I've created a (paid-for) that identifies sequences of underscore characters and places text fields on top of them, see: https://try67.blogspot.com/2020/04/acrobatreader-convert-underscores-to.html

Another (paid-for) tool I've created will identify specific Wingdings characters and add radio-buttons or check-boxes on top of them: http://try67.blogspot.com/2015/09/acrobatreader-convert-wingdings-to.html