How to Define Names and Export Values in Acrobat

Defining names and export values is an important step to take before developing a form in Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. For each form field you insert, you will need to use a short name to describe the field as well as define export values so you can see what a user has inputted into the form in one quick glance.

Things You'll Need

• Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

Instructions

1. Start Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional and open a PDF document to which you would like to add form fields such as radio buttons, check boxes, combo boxes or list boxes.

2. Decide what type of form field you are going to use in the Adobe Acrobat PDF. The type of form filed you use will determine what type of name and export value you will need to define.

3. Define a name for the form field you want to insert into the PDF you have open. The name for the form field represents the inquiry you are posing to the user of your form. For example, if you were creating a combo box that asked the user to choose their age range you may want to define the name "age" for this form field.

4. Determine the items that you are going to ask the user to choose from. In our previous example, you may choose to let the users choose between "18-32," "33-55" and "56+". If you have a radio button or check box form field, you will have only two items listed.

5. Choose an export value for each of the items the user can choose from. You can name these the same as your list values or shorten them to be more concise.

6. Review what will be returned to you when the user submits the form in Adobe Acrobat. You will receive information in the format of name:value. So using the previous example, you may receive "age:33-55" from a user. This clearly tells you what the user submitted in regards to a certain question on your form.