Distribute and Collect Forms
Distribute Forms through Email
Send the form
1. Open the form that you wish to distribute
2. Go to the Tools panel > Forms > click on Distribute
3. The Distribute Form wizard will open
4. Below How do you want to collect responses from your recipients? select Manually collect responses in my email inbox
5. Click Next
6. Below How do you want to distribute your form? choose one of the following:
- Select Send it automatically using Adobe Acrobat if you have a mail application such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail set up on your computer
- Select Save a local copy and manually send it later to save the form on your computer and open an internet browser based email to send the form
7. Click Next
8. In the To box type in the email addresses that you wish to send the form to. Or click on the To to open the address book of your email program
9. Under Subject you can enter a custom subject heading if you want
10. Under Message you can change the default message if you want
11. Click Send when you are done
12. Adobe will prepare the form, then send it to all the contacts on the list
Open the Form
1. This is what the email message will look like to the recipients:
2. The user will then open the PDF through the attachment
3. After they have filled out the form, they will click the Submit Form button in the upper right corner
4. The Send Form window will open
- If the user has an email application set up on their computer, their email address and name will be automatically filled out
- If you they using an internet browser based email, they will have to manually enter their email and name
- Click Send
5. They will select what email client they are using and click OK
6. Then they will get an Outgoing Message Notification message, click Ok
Receive the Completed Forms
1. Check your inbox, when a user submits a form you will receive the following message:
2. Double click the attachment to open it
3. The Add Completed Form to Response File window will open
- A response file for this form has already been created, so unless you want to make multiple response files, it is simpler to select the circle next to Add to an Existing Response File
- Click Ok
4. Adobe will automatically insert the response to the Response File (for more information see Tracking Responses section)
Distribute Forms through a Network Folder
Send the Form
1. Open the form that you wish to distribute
2. Go to the Tools panel > Forms > click on Distribute
3. The Distribute Form wizard will open
4. Below How do you want to collect responses from your recipients? select Automatically collect responses on my own internal server
5. Click Next
6. You will be asked what server you want to collect the responses with, select either a Network Folder or a SharePoint website
- If you choose a Network Folder, you will be asked to enter the path for the folder. Click Browse to find the folder on your computer
- If you choose a SharePoint website you will be asked to enter the website URL, then click Get Workspaces to verify the URL
7. Click Next
8. In the To box type in the email addresses that you wish to send the form to. Or clicking on the To will open the address book of your email program
9. Under Subject you can enter a custom subject heading if you want
10. Under Message you can change the default message if you want
11. Click Send when you are done
12. Adobe will prepare the form, then send it to all the contacts on the list
Open the Form
1. This is what the email message will look like to recipients:
2. The user will then open the PDF by clicking on the attachment
3. After they have filled out the form, they will click the Submit Form button in the upper right corner
4. The Send Form window will open
- If the user has an email application set up on their computer, their email address and name will be automatically filled out
- If they are using an internet browser based email, they will have to manually enter their email and name
- Click Send
- They will select what email client they are using and click OK
- Then they will get an Outgoing Message Notification message, click Ok
Recieve the Completed Form
1. If you open the Network Folder you choose or the SharePoint website, you will see a folder labeled Form_name_distributed
2. In that file you will see the original form, and a folder labeled Responses
3. In the Responses folder, a file for each user that responded will appear, opening the file you will be able to see their response
Tracking Responses
When you distribute a form, the Tracker will automatically open, however you can open it any time by going to Tools panel > Forms > click on Track
Tacking Responses to Forms Distributed by Email
View Responses in the Tracker
1. Go to the Tools panel > Forms > click on Track to open the Tracker
2. On the side bar to the left, under Forms, below Distributed click on the form that you have sent
3. Here you can see a summary of your response file: how many recipients have responded, how many have not, and the total number of recipients. You also have the option to send other emails to recipients, or add new recipients
Add Responses to Tracker
1. When you receive the completed form in an email, open the attachment
2. The Add Completed Form to Response File window will open > select to add to an existing response file, which has already been created in the tracker, and click Ok
3. This will automatically add the response to the Tracker and open the Response File
4. Now that you have imported this response, you will also see that this user has responded in the Tracker
View Responses in the Response File
1. You can open the Response File any time, by clicking on View Responses in the Tracker
2. In the response file, you will see a list of all the responses. Each file in the form is in a different row so you can see all of the users’ responses
- Click on a column header to can sort the responses by that field
- You will see a small preview of the form on the left, so you know for sure what form you are working with
- Click on Filter if you want to narrow down the responses showing by a specific criteria
- Click on Export to export the information into a CSV File which can be opened in Microsoft Excel
- Click on Archive to save the responses in an archived file on your computer
- Click on Add if a user has filled out the form and sent it as an attachment, not using the submit button, and you need to add the form from a file on your computer
- Click Delete if you want to remove a response
3. To close the Response File click on the X in the upper right corner
Tracking responses to forms distributed on a network or SharePoint
1. Open the Tracker
2. On the side bar to the left, under Forms, below Distributed click on the form that you have sent
3. Here you can see a summary of your response file, or how many recipients have responded, how many have not, and the total number of recipients. You also have the option to send other emails to recipients, or add more recipients
4. You also have the options to Stop Collecting Data or to Open the Original Form
5. Click on View Responses, and any responses will be automatically added to the Response File
- In the response file, you will see a list of all the responses. Each file in the form is in a different row so you can see all of the users’ responses
- By clicking on a column header, you can sort responses by that field
- You will see a small preview of the form on the left, so you know for sure what form you are working with
- Click on Update to manually update the file with any new forms entered to the server or SharePoint
- Click on Filter if you want to narrow down the responses showing by a specific criteria
- Click on Export to export the information into a CSV File which can be opened in Microsoft Excel
- Click on Archive to save the responses in an archived file on your computer
- Click on Add if a user has filled out the form and sent it as an attachment, not using the submit button, and you need to add the form from a file on your computer
- Click Delete if you want to remove a response
6. To close the Response File click on the X in the upper right corner
