Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Just switch! - Creating PDF forms with StarOffice 8
In my last "Just switch!" blog entry I said that next time I would talk about the OASIS OpenDocument XML file format. However, today at CeBIT I decided to write about the creation of PDF forms with StarOffice 8. To my surprise many people at CeBIT are very excited about this new feature in StarOffice 8. Therefore, I thought I should tell more people about this new functionality.

With "View - Toolbar - Controls" one can bring up the toolbar with the form controls. For my little "article" today I created a very simple registration form containing a few text and combo boxes.

Selecting "Controls ..." from the right-click menu brings up the properties dialog.

For the "Title" list entries I typed "Mr.", "Ms." and "Mrs." and used SHIFT+ENTER to separate the words. One can also type everything as one string with a semicolon as the delimiter.

For the second combo box I also assigned a simple help text for testing purposes.

The exported PDF document includes the text boxes, the combo boxes, the combo box list entries and the help text.

StarOffice 8 is a very powerful tool for creating forms. With the new XForms support which I will explain in more detail later, StarOffice 8 also supports an open standard for forms.
( Mrz 13 2005, 09:44:13 PM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [3]

Kommentare:

hello, once i create a pdf form how to place it on the server (free web/serverhosting preferably) and set it so the survey may begin?

thank you.

cheers,

-- joe

ps: please drop me a note on my e-mail, too.

Gesendet von jose am April 15, 2005 at 10:20 AM CEST #

I created a sample for and converted it to pdf. I can enter data into this form and print it too. But I can't save it. How do I save the form after entering the data.

Gesendet von Jayakara Kini am September 28, 2005 at 09:00 AM CEST #

It seems like Adobe is doing everything they can to prevent other applications than Adobe Acrobat from creating PDF-documents containing form elements where the form data is actually saved to the copy of the PDF you save :-(

Gesendet von Joaquim Homrighausen am Mai 10, 2006 at 12:45 PM CEST #