Importing an excel column into a fillable pdf

[David5E68]

Hi.

I'm a teacher and the government, in it's infinite wisdom, has decided that I have to fill out a pdf spreadsheet each day that keeps track of student attendance.  I can download a class list as excel document. I can export it as a tab dileneated document.  The problem is, that when I try to import the list of names, it doesn't work. The title of the pdf form that I want to import the date into is Student. I named my column "Student." I followe the directions: prepare form; clear form; import data; options; text; import file.  Nothing imports to populate the cells. Each cell under the pdf column Sutdent is named separately, Student1, Student2, etc... 

I'm using a mac.This should be a simple operation, and yet it's not. Can anyone out there help me?

Thanks.

David

[try67]

In order to be able to import it directly your input file must include all field names, and in the right format, which is two tab-delimited rows with the field names as the first one and the values as the second, like this:

Student1<tab>Student2<tab>etc.

John Doe<tab>Mary Smith<tab>etc.

You can save a template file in Excel with the first row and then it's just a matter of converting the column with the data to a row. That can be done using a plain-text editor like Notepad++, where you can paste the contents of the row and replace the line-breaks with tabs. Then copy it to the template file, save it, close it, and then import it in Acrobat.

Another option, which is easier to use but more complicated to implement is to use a custom-made script to read the input text file, parse it and then automatically enter the data from it into those fields. If you're interested I could develop that for you, for a small fee. It will basically add a new button to Acrobat that will prompt you to select the input file and then do the rest automatically for you.