Data merge pdf form

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    • Merging Data into a PDF form
    Merging Data into a PDF form /t5/acrobat-discussions/merging-data-into-a-pdf-form/td-p/10028277 Jul 25, 2018 Jul 25, 2018

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    I need to revise some old sales tax returns for a client and wanted to see if I could do it with either Adobe Acrobat or InDesign.

    The tax returns are interactive and look like this - http://tax.illinois.gov/TaxForms/Sales/ST-1-X.pdf

    I want to use an Excel file with my data and map it to the forms for each month that needs to be revised.

    I have 4 years of tax returns (48 months) and three different entities so this would create 144 individual sheets.

    Can anyone recommend the best way to do this?

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    1 Correct answer

    Community Expert , Aug 01, 2018 Aug 01, 2018 Thom Parker • Community Expert , Aug 01, 2018 Aug 01, 2018

    Importing data into a form requires that the data name in the data file exactly matches the field name in the PDF. For Excel data that means that the first entry in each column is the data(field) name.

    1 1 Upvote 5 Replies 5 /t5/acrobat-discussions/merging-data-into-a-pdf-form/m-p/10028278#M112857 Jul 25, 2018 Jul 25, 2018

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    It can be done with Acrobat. The first thing you'd need to do is to save the file so that it can be inspected/edited with Acrobat. You can do this by opening it in Acrobat and selecting: File > Save a Copy

    Then open this new file and go into form editing mode so you can discover what the various field names are. You will want to create a spreadsheet whose first row contains these identical field names (in any order you want), and the subsequent rows should contain the corresponding data for the 144 returns. Once your spreadsheet is correctly created, you need to export it as a tab-delimited text file. It is this data file that Acrobat will be able to read and import data from.

    To import the data in Acrobat, open the blank form, go into form editing mode, and in the right-hand panel and select: More > Import Data

    and select your tab-delimited data file. You will then be prompted to select a row that corresponds to the record you want to import.

    It's possible to use JavaScript to automate the manual process of importing data I just described. If you plan on doing this type of thing more in the future, it might be worth pursuing, but it won't take too long to manually do 144 records. I suspect most of the time spent on this job will be in preparing the spreadsheet.