How do I clear a radio button?

[Guest]

Is it possible to deselect a choice in a radio button group on a fillable PDF? There are times a radio button choice may be selected accidentally. When this happens, the only choice one may have is to abandon the form they have been completing, and start from scratch in hopes the mistake is not made again. Our forms are very detailed and with multiple pages and combinations of drop downs, check boxes, radio buttons, text boxes, etc... with questions totaling well over 100.  You can imagine someone's frustration if they've completed over 100 questions and near the end of the form there's a radio button question they did not mean to answer... The radio buttons are used exclusively for one choice selections only, otherwise check boxes are used. I'm interested in any simple solutions. Maybe Adobe can come up with a solution. I don't understand why radio buttons don't function the same way as check boxes. If you click once, it's marked; if you click again, it clear. Any help is greatly appreciated. Detailed steps for the fix are also appreciated. Thanks!

[Cynthesize]

Does anyone else think that check boxes are ugly/messy and do not catch the eye like a radio button? I am making a Hazard assessment sheet where a user selects many things from a list. I wanted the form to have the clean look of a voting ballot with filled in boxes or circles. I do not believe in radio-button orthodoxy, after all it is just an empty circle that can get filled in!  Is it possible to change the ✓ symbol into something else?  Maybe a ■?  Maybe different checkbox "styles" could be incorporated into Adobe Acrobat forms? Free the radio-button from it's functional servitude by the form design cognoscente! Do you realize how many forums and blogs there are  that deal with engineering the radio-button to be used differently than the designers intended?!  Adobe allows you to have radio buttons that only have 1 in a group, so why not make them de-selectable? Thank you for listening to my rant. The sentence "This is the functional definition of radio-buttons" set me off! 

[Cynthesize]

Haha well I just found Check Box Style, I am happy, but I still like the radio-button style better! 🙂

[kathryne81844580]

Super! Brilliant. Thank you so much for this!

[ujokasjdflkjawkfjasdf]

Thank you for explaining the functionality of radio buttons and offering a workaround using checkboxes. While it’s true that radio buttons were inspired by old car radio buttons—where one button was always pressed in while others popped out—the analogy doesn’t fully align with digital radio buttons.

In the physical radio buttons, one choice was always selected because of their mechanical design, but digital radio buttons operate differently. By default, they start with no button selected, which contradicts the idea that they must always have an option chosen, as in the physical counterparts. The concept behind radio buttons is simply to limit the user to one selection within a group, not necessarily to require a selection at all times.

It does feel a bit outdated in the digital space to disallow deselecting a choice without resetting the form entirely. The functionality of selecting only one at a time can still be preserved without forcing a choice to remain locked in. I appreciate the workaround with checkboxes to allow deselection, though ideally, native support for this feature would be beneficial. Thanks again for sharing your approach!

[Andrea24279977nkpc]

I could uncheck the radio button by adding a new additional one in the same group, previewing the form and checking the new button, then deleting it and saving the form.

[try67]

Or you could simply clear the form...

[Andrea24279977nkpc]

not if you want to keep all data already entered, as clearing the form will remove all of them in addition to resetting the radio buttons

[fere5FC7]

In the case of ...

"There are times a radio button choice may be selected accidentally. When this happens, the only choice one may have is to abandon the form they have been completing...."

... then,  the  Edit / Undo action worked for me,

near the end of a long form, which I was about to abandon, after I searched for help, to no avail, and just before I clicked on "NO, do not save changes before closing "  ...

[LarsenLP]

This is actually a brilliant advice. Nice workaround!

[PrintingServices]

That requires some user intelligence, which is not guaranteed.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Here is a sample PDF with your Radio and Checkbox options.

[PrintingServices]

This is great, David, thanks very much for posting it.

[stephenh22275384]

I have been coming to the Community for assistance for quite a few years and have learned to trust the advice of TRY67 as TRY always has spot-on ideas.  One of our users came to me today and showed me the radio button dilema described in this discussion.  In fact, I had the same issue with another form from one of our vendors a few weeks ago, but I did not have time to devote to fixing it.  When I saw the same issue with my user today, I decided it was time to search for a solution.

I searched the Community for a solution and found this discussion.  When I saw the green Correct answer by TRY67 near the top of the thread, I thougth "I've hit the mother lode!  It's TRY67, so this won't take long"!

Then I saw the solution, which was the worst.  There is no Adobe solution.

It's one of those Adobe things that just don't make sense, that a product so great didn't think of this before they put it in production.

Usually, when I see TRY67's answer, I accept it and move on.  I didn't want to go back to my user and tell her the bad news.  It's the end of the day, so I told myself, "see what other ideas are in this thread".

I was aware of the Clear Form function, but as many users have mentioned, this doesn't work well, when you discover the incorrectly selected radio button near the end of your form.

On the 3rd page of posts, I found   fere5FC7 's post.  Bingo!  Such a simple solution.  So brilliant!

It reminds me of the tractor-trailer that was wedged under the overpass because the driver miscalculated the height of the overpass and got stuck.  As traffic backed up downtown, panic set in.  The truck driver called his dispatcher for help.  The dispatcher started looking for engineers to determine how to raise the overpass just enough to get his truck unstuck.

About 5 minutes later, a plumber who was about 5 cars behind the truck, told his helper to stay in the van and he walked up to the tractor-trailer with his screw driver.  He calmly stuck the screwdriver in the tire valves on the trailer's 8 tires and let 20 pounds of air out of the tires.

He told the trucker to slowly move and the truck was low enough to get free of the overpass.

 fere5FC7 's simple solution to fixing the problem, without losing all your hard-earned data entry, was like letting the air out of your tires to get unstuck from the overpass.

Thanks  fere5FC7 .   It was simply beautiful!

[try67]

I'm sorry to hear you didn't like my reply, but I still think it's the correct one. Using Undo only works if selecting the radio-button was the very last thing you did. Otherwise you will also need to undo everything else you did up to that point... Maybe it's a good solution in some cases, but certainly not in all of them.

There are other solutions, of course, but they need to be set up in advance by the form's author (such as using a button to reset only that group of fields, instead of the entire form), but if you're going to do that, you might as well just use check-boxes instead of radio-buttons, and make life much easier for everyone.

[stephenh22275384]

Oh no.  Nothing wrong with your reply, as I agree it is the correct one.  I also agree with your analysis about the solutions that talk about adding a button to a field group.  It's ok for the author, but not so much for the end user.  I also agree that it makes more sense to use checkboxes.

The Edit-Undo button is just another arrow in the quiver while waiting for Adobe's engineers to fix these things.

Thank you for all the great help you have given me and all the other Community members over many years!

[PrintingServices]

A well-written post, stephenh22275384!

[Private info and signature removed]

[aaron2a]

So you accidentally clicked a button and saved your complete form.  We found a work-around to deal with this. Basically what you do is add a button to the form under the same group-> go to the preview -> Select the new button -> Sacrifice that button with the selection in it by deleting it.

[try67]

That's a very cumbersome way of solving this issue. You can just clear the form, or run this JavaScript code to clear this one field:

this.resetForm(["Radio1"]);

(replace "Radio1" with the actual field name, of course)

[lanecl1]

Edit->Clear Form.

[Eric22455030vydf]

An alternative to clearing the form is to combine the target group with another group, then split them apart.  

Create a new radio group, change the name of the target group to the same name as the new group (the new group will now have 4 buttons). Then change the name of the target group back to the desired name. The radio buttons will be unchecked.

[try67]

That is an incredibly convoluted solution to a problem that can be easily solved with a single line of code.

[christyr89668360]

If you, as the form creator/owner, want to reset the form, you can just do it the way it's mentioned below (Tools - Forms - Preapare Form - More Options - Clear Form). BUT, if you want the end user to be able to deselect radio buttons or you just want a quick way to clear the form (or just specific fields) it is possible to add a button to your PDF to do just that.  

Here's how to create & label the button:

Place the button form field on your form where you want it, give it a name and click the All Properties link. This opens the Button Properties dialog box. Click the Actions tab, then choose Reset a form in the Select Action from the drop down list. Next, click Add..., and select the fields you want to reset in the Reset a Form dialog box. Click OK. On the Options tab you can give the button a label. If you don't, the button will be blank and the end user won't know what it's for. 

[ScottVC]

In Acrobat 2024, if you are the author creating the form and need to reset it after testing, go to All Tools > Prepare a Form. Then in the Fields panel on the right side there is an Options menu (three dots) which has Clear Form. 

[bricec79743151]

One way to do this is to toggle the option "button is checked by default" on/off.

[John F. Chionglo]

If you want to modify the behavior of the radio button group such that the selected radio button can be unselected by clicking on it then here is one way to do it. For this example consider three radio buttons in the group and the radio button group's name is "RadioButton1". The following code should be added as a document-level script:

var rb = getField("RadioButton1");
rb.exportValues = [ "First", "Second", "Third" ];
var cval = "";

The following code should be added to every radio button that should be unselected:

if (cval==rb.value) {
  rb.value = "";
  cval = "";
} else {
  cval = rb.value;
}

I have included an example PDF document with radio buttons that behave as you required.