Want to import Excel data into my PDF

[BobBol-rTtCx3]

Want to import Excel data into my PDF (using Prepare Form/More/Import Data) but my PDF won't recognize my tab-delimited excel .txt document where the columns correspond with PDF field names

[George_Johnson]

Do you get any error messages? Do the field names in the data file exactly match the field names in the form?

[gkaiseril]

When you perform this option, what is the file type you are looking for?

The default is "FDF".

Are you getting any error messages?

Do the field names have any special white space characters like the space, underscore, dot, etc.?

Sample form with tab delimited text file attached

[BobBol-rTtCx3]

thanks g and George; the articles I saw said a .txt tab delimited file would work but get message that acrobat can't use the file; how do I get a .fdf file out of an .xls file? that's not a choice in the Excel save-as;

(I'm using data in Excel for mail merge into Word docs; was hoping to use the same spreadsheet to merge into a PDF)

[George_Johnson]

Can you post the exact text of the message that you get, or post a screen shot?

[gkaiseril]

You cannot get an FDF file out of Excel. It is special file format unique to Acrobat/Reader and is designed to transfer data and gather data from PDF forms. There is a an FDF toolkit available from Adobe that will help one write a program to generate an FDF file.

Within the PDF posted there is an tab delimited file created from Excel by saving as a tab delimited text file.

Importing tab delimited data into a PDF is done one row at a time. Unless specified only the row of data under the column headings is imported. To import other rows one needs to use custom JavaScript within the PDF form and specify the row of data from the tab delimited text file. See the Acrobat JavaScript API Reference importTextData method for more information.

For a mail merge action see the Create PDFs with PDFMaker (Windows) help documentation.

[BobBol-rTtCx3]

thx all; away from my office and my PC until Mond

[BobBol-rTtCx3]

if I can import a single row from an xls file that's fine as that happens to be the work flow on this project

the xls file I'd like to use has about 20 columns and not all the data would be coming into the PDF; (most goes into various Word docs as mail merge data) what I'm getting right now with an import is a screen that shows the file that's importing but it's gibberish and no data ends up in the PDF

[gkaiseril]

You need to save the Excel file as tab delimited text file not an Excel file. You import the text file and you should be able see each row as text

Did you download the sample file I provided?

Only columns with the same name as field names in the PDF will be imported. Any columns with different names will not be imported but will cause a pop-up warning window to appear.

[BobBol-rTtCx3]

i did see that file, the simpleinvoice file; thx; i'll keep trying