Hello,
I handle many PDF form submissions daily. I am looking for the fastest and most efficient way to extract the form fields' data from these PDF forms and export it into an Excel spreadsheet (CSV file). First let me describe the process as it is currently done manually with Acrobat Pro DC:
I) Locate and press "Merge Data Files into Spreadsheet" option. This option itself seems to be accessible in 2 ways:
A. Edit -> Form Options -> Merge Data Files into Spreadsheet ----------- Note that "Form Options" seems to only be present under "Edit" if a PDF is open
B. Run "Prepare Form" action on some file -> Press "More" (hammer & wrench icon, located in right sidebar) -> Merge Data Files into Spreadsheet
II) Press Add Files, Navigate to and Select files, Press Export
III) Give the csv file a name and choose export destination, Click Export
This is all already very helpful but I see several ways the process could be improved even further through automation of some kind.
1) Have Adobe give a more descriptive default name than "report.csv" in step III. Suggestions include the filename having something to do with the current date, title(s) of the form files being merged into the csv report, letting the user specify a default naming scheme, etc. This way one would not have to type "W4Forms2016-24-08.csv" or something similar for each report. Or at the very least, have it suggest something different than "report.csv" by default if there is already a report.csv file in that folder, such as report(1).csv instead.
2) Improve the headings (in row 1) of the Excel csv report. By default they look something like "topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].f1_01_0_[0]" (cell B1), "topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].f1_02_0_[0]" (Cell C1), and so on. One option would be to have the user be able to specify the headings of each column beforehand to something more descriptive (e.g. B1 = "Name", C1 = "Age", etc.)
Another solution, which seems like it should be very plausible, is to merge the data into an existing csv file rather than create a new one for each report. This way the form field data could simply be exported to an existing Excel spreadsheet with headings already defined by the user. This is the single biggest improvement I would suggest/feature I want to know about if it already exists. Right now the workaround is copying and pasting the csv data into another spreadsheet which does have those headings already set by me, though you can imagine this is less than ideal.
3) This is probably the least plausible suggestion but have Acrobat Pro monitor specified folders for new PDF forms added to them. This monitoring could either be continuous or a periodic check (e.g. daily). Upon detection, Acrobat Pro automatically creates a csv report with that PDF file's form field data (or even better, adds it to an existing csv report file like I described in suggestion 2). I tried to mess with the custom actions and commands to achieve something along these lines, but I could not get farther than having a "Prepare Form" action. This doesn't seem to be able to be conditionally triggered (by either additions to monitored folders or certain amount of time, like a day, elapsing). But even leaving that aside, I could not even get deeper than the most basic functionality of this "Prepare Form" action. As I said in IB when describing the current process, the "More" button is a suboption of the Prepare Form action, yet I cannot seem to call this functionality when making Prepare Form actions. As far as I can tell, actions can do very little to assist me with my process, whether it is through automated report-generation or if not that, at least making the manual step a one-to-few click process rather than navigating through various menus and submenus as I described at the beginning of this post.
I know it's a long post but I hope it can either spark some discussion or help others who may be dealing with similar workflows. Other suggestions that may make the process easier for me but were not explicitly mentioned here are also very welcome. I'm currently on the free trial but would most certainly purchase this product if even some of my concerns could be addressed. Thanks.
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