You use FDF when submitting form data to a server, receiving the response, and incorporating it into the interactive form. FDF files are smaller than PDF files because they only contain the form field data, and not the entire form. In both these cases, that’s exactly what FDF files are for: importing and exporting data in PDFs.įDF, aka, Forms Data Format, is for processing data that’s submitted (via email or the “submit” button) from a form. Or maybe you need to do the reverse-meaning, populate an interactive form with data from your database. But you’re not going to need to have the entire form submitted back to your organization, only the data that users input. Of course, you’re going to want to gather the information in that form and put it into your database so you can use it. Say you’ve got an interactive form that a lot of people use.

Eric Mcguire, Integrated Sales and Support.

You do this for every record you have in your Excel file and save the PDF file to a new name. This will fill the PDF form with the selected values: On the next screen you can then pick which record to import, you can only import one record at a time: On the file dialog, select to import a text file, browse to your exported text file and select it. Once you have your Tab Delimited Text file, open your PDF form, and select Tools>Forms>More Form Options and click on Import: This is one of the export options in Excel (and other spread sheet applications) that is available after you select File>Save As:

When you export your data file from Excel, you need to select the 'Tab Delimited Text' format. In this sample, I took the first approach and used the field names as my column headers: You can either match the names that you are using in your PDF form, or you need to modify the field names in the PDF form so that they match the column names in Excel. The columns need to be named the same way as the field names in the PDF form.

Yes, but you there are two things you need to do in Excel for this to work:

Import data into pdf form