New to Acrobat. Conditional Formatting?

[Guest]

I'm the HR for 4 companies.  I only know the basics of Acrobat, so I know nothing about coding.  Every time I hire someone, I need to fill out a form for our AG's office.  I'd like to know if there is a simple way to fill text boxes based on one cell.  If I select "Company A" from the first cell's options, then "Company A's" address, phone number, etc. would be filled in the following boxes.

Thank you.

[Thom Parker]

Yes, there are a few ways you can Auto-fill a set of fields on a PDF. 

1. You can do this with no coding, but a little bit of manual effort. Fill out just the fields you want auto-filled, and then use "Manage Data > Export Data" menu item on the popup menu in the Prepare Form tools. Do this for each data set, Then all you need to do is import the data into the form. This process can be automated with some simple scripts.

2. Add the auto-fill data to a script on your dropdown selection. Here's an article that discussed how to do this:

https://acrobatusers.com/tutorials/change_another_field

There are a couple of example files.

Here's more info on using dropdown list fields

https://www.pdfscripting.com/public/List-Field-Usage-and-Handling.cfm

There are also other ways to do this using Folder level scripts. The advantage with both the folder level script and #1 that uses the data files is that they will work for a set of different forms, as long as the field names are the same. So you don't have to build out the same dropdown in each form. It also makes it easy to change if any of the info needs to be updated. 

[Guest]

Thank you for your quick reply.  I'll give this a shot.  I currently have drop down menus on all of the cells.  I'm hoping this will make it at least one step easier.  Thanks!

[try67]

As mentioned, this can be achieved using a script. For example, it's possible to take the data from a spreadsheet (saved as a plain-text file) and use it as the source to a data-model which populates various fields based on a selection in a drop-down.

I've developed a (paid-for) script that allows you to do just that, easily and quickly. You can find it here: http://try67.blogspot.com/2015/07/acrobat-populate-fields-from-dropdown.html