Auto-fill Adobe PDF form from Excel

[toddvohs]

I work at a small agriculture implement dealer where a lot of hand written invoices are still done.  I have created an Excel spreadsheet that is fairly complex so that novice users can input minimal data and print buttons for easily printing an invoice, quote, work order, etc.  Most all of our customers are tax exempt and every purchase requires a State Tax Exempt form.  We have 4 dealerships in a Tri-State region but the State where the point of sale occurred is where the form originates so I only have to deal with Illinois and Missouri.  The forms are downloaded from their respective State's Dept. of Revenue website.  I have not found an easy way to automatically populate the form from the data input into Excel.

Here's what I would like to have my spreadsheet do:

1) Salesperson enters the name, address, FEIN, etc. into the spreadsheet

2) Clicks a button that opens the form and populates the spreadsheet

3) Saves the populated form into the spreadsheet (they save the sheet for every transaction to re-open later)

I know I can embed a PDF into a spreadsheet so that a user can click it, opens in Acrobat, manually fill it in and print from Acrobat.  So, I know I can carry the blank form along inside the spreadsheet.

But some of our users are barely computer literate.  I have created a sheet in my main spreadsheet for Printing so they input minimal info, change to that sheet and there are 8-10 buttons for printing an invoice, service, work order, sales tracking, etc. where I would like to have another button to print a Tax Exempt form from the State's PDF.  I currently have a print button that prints the information needed for the Tax Exempt form and the user still has to manually input it but at least they don't have to hunt & peck through the spreadsheet to get the information.

The issue is that I did not create the forms, they are each created different from each State DOR.  The form is available to the public for download.  And example is at https://dor.mo.gov/forms/149.pdf. 

Any way to do this?  Thanks in advance.  Any help or ideas would be appreciated.

[try67]

This is not easily done. You would need to structure the data in a format that Acrobat can process. The easiest way to do it is with a tab-delimited text file, which can be created in Excel. It would have to be two (or more) rows, the first name containing the field names and the rest containing their values. Then you would need to use the Import Form Data command in Acrobat, select that file, select the row to import, and the data will be copied into the matching fields.