Creating Acrobat forms that users can save changes to

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Sometimes, otherwise positive technological advances leave important functions behind.

For example, CD’s are so small, the liner notes are usually unreadable. Similarly, cell phones and PDA keyboards have become smaller than most people’s fingers.

And when typewriters gave way to dedicated word processors, and then personal computers and all the other replacements, so did the ability to fill out paper forms easily.

In large part, forms have moved onto the web, but there are still many that need to be filled out in hard copy. There are plenty of government sites, for example, which will provide a PDF version of a form, which usually has not been enabled as a form, so it must be printed out and filled out by hand, or on a typewriter if you can find one at a local Kinkos.

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro, you may have attempted to add form fields to one of these, only to discover that the typical user with Adobe Reader does not have the rights to save the form with entered data.

Users will see this message upon opening the form:
“You cannot save data typed into this form”

To enable your forms to be filled out, open the form in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Select “Enable Usage Rights in Adobe Reader” from the “Advanced” menu.

You may find that there are still problems, such as, if the user duplicates the form or uses the “save AS” function, they may find their rights disappear.