Web Design & Hosting by Miguel Estrada » How to save data in fillable PDF forms

How to save data in fillable PDF forms May 29, 2008

Posted by developpeur in : English , trackback

I recently had to fill up an important amount of government fillable PDF forms, as you may already know you can not save this data (most of the time) you may only print such forms, so there’s no way you keep a digital record in your so called “paperless office”. Or like in my case fill the forms at home in my laptop and print them the next day at the office. The answer is simple, you still won’t be able to save the data, but you can print it to a “digital document” such as XPS or TIF and print it or review it later (still you won’t be able to re-edit such file).

Well, probably others may have come to this solution, but for the sake of rich and useful search engine results here goes the solution:

Fill out the fillable PDF form with Acrobat Reader.
Click the print button on the Acrobat Reader.
Instead of choosing your default printer choose: Microsoft XPS Document Writer (if not installed download it for free HERE).
Click OK or Print
You’ll be prompted for assigning a name to the file, directory path and saving it, so just do that and you’re done.

Now, the next morning or year when you want to print on paper that form, just look for the file and open it with Internet Explorer. Either open your IE, and then go to File+Open and browse to the file from there, or open it by right-clicking the .xps file and go to the “Open with” option and choose IE.

If you want to know more about XPS files, I wrote a post about them last year: XPS vs PDF for Digital Documents.

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