Adobe Acrobat 9: Auto-Completing Form Fields in Acrobat (and Reader!)

by David R. Mankin  

If you find yourself filling out Acrobat forms frequently, you are probably tired of typing the same things over and over again. First Name, Last Name, Street Address... they don't change from day to day. Both Acrobat Professional and Reader have a great feature to help you with these repetitive typing tasks. The only catch is that it might be disabled on your installation.

Acrobat's Auto-Complete feature will help you speed your way through form fields in which you have typed similar data previously. To enable Auto-Complete, choose Edit > Preferences (or Acrobat > Preferences on the Macintosh). Click on the word Forms at the left, and look at the Auto-Complete section at the right. Your setting choices are Off, Basic and Advanced.



Here are Acrobat's own description of Basic and Advanced:

Basic: The basic auto-complete feature stores the information you enter into form fields and uses these entries to suggest relevant choices as you type into a field. Once you enter a character into a field, a drop-down box displays a list of only the most probable matches. Double-click or press Down Arrow in an empty field to display an even larger list of possible matches.

Advanced: The advanced auto-complete feature stores the information you enter into form fields and uses these entries to suggest relevant choices as you type into a field. If there are probable matches for a field, tabbing into that field will automatically display a list of them. If there is a very probable match, it will be entered in the field automatically. Pressing Tab while the pointer is over an entry in the list chooses the entry and moves to the next field.



There is also a check box to enable or disable numerical data inclusion, and a handy button to facilitate manual editing of the saved entries.



Auto-Complete can cut down on the time you spend filling out forms. You likely use a similar feature in your browser--why not use it in your PDF forms as well.

 

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David R. Mankin is a Certified Technical Trainer, desktop publisher, computer graphic artist, and Web page developer. He is an Adobe-Certified Expert in Acrobat.

Comments

[Ralph M]

I am not a developer but user of forms on the web, fyi.

When I open a PDF from the State gov website, it opens within Reader in the browser (do not have full version just reader).
The forms all come in with the purple bar at top with "can't save data typed in this form, must print, blah blah..."

We used to be able to however fill in these forms to print, and then later when came back to them, the autocomplete worked and though that particular time using the form wasn't saveable, the field data was still there; e.g., start typing 4 and the previous zip codes with 4 came up, start typing M in the name field and the company name came up as an autocomplete option.
Now nothing comes up.

When I go to edit-preferences-forms, it is checked for all autocomplete, and internet options are set to remember forms in autocomplete also.

However, Edit Entry List in Reader prefs is empty/grayed out.
It will populate with what I do while in the browser and doing multiple tabs, but not once I leave and return. It used to do this, so it is possible.

Again, a user with Reader & gov forms only, not a developer or file host, so no way to program around it.

It's a must for commonly entered fields (eg. company name, address, client names, addresses, descriptions, etc.)

Any idea?

[David Mankin]

I'd be curious to know if the problem exists only in the plug-in (inside a browser window) or if Reader (stand-alone) is suffering the same issues. Right off the bat, I don't really know what might be causing this. I'll see if I can find anything about this issue, and will report back if I find anything.

David