Recovering PDF Fields for data extraction

[anthony_barron]

Hello,

I'm not sure how to resolve this since I don't know much about Adobe Acrobat. We have several previously fillable PDF forms which were sent out and returned to us. We used the fillable pdf to populate an excel document automatically. However, recently many of the forms were returned as a flat file. We are no longer able to automatically extract the data. Is there ANY way we can recover the fillable formatting for this document?

At best all I can think to do now is convert it to word and extract the text via a python script. But it would take a long time write the script to accurately pull this information. And also, I cannot access the radio button values.

How can I recover this?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByKmbz5r7aLrWkx4bEFlRlg5TEE/view?usp=sharing

[George_Johnson · Accepted solution]

There's nothing you can do with such files to get them to revert back to a fillable form. When you receive such a form, you should ask the send what PDF viewer they used and encourage them to use Adobe Reader.

[anthony_barron]

Thanks George.

[anthony_barron]

George,

looking towards finding a solution if we cannot get in touch with the users who submitted the form, is there a way to do a batch conversion of hundreds of these pdf files to word documents in order to extract the text? I used creative cloud but I was limited to one at a time.

-Anthony

[Bernd Alheit]

In Acrobat Pro you can use the Action Wizard.