In combination with Adobe's LiveCycle Designer, Acrobat provides a really easy to use method of distributing and collecting questionnaires. We've recently started using these questionnaires for some client projects for a number of reasons that I'll go over here.
Easy, Fast Form Creation
LiveCycle Designer makes form creation really easy. I haven’t spent enough time with it yet to know if it can create HTML forms for use on websites, which would be killer, but it is quite a bit easier than the traditional, tedious task of hand-coding forms. That small initial investment in time is what got me to try LiveCycle Designer in the first place, and it turned out pretty well.
Easy Distribution
It’s incredibly easy to distribute the forms either directly through LiveCycle designer, which allows you to send to individuals or a group of recipients, or by saving the form on your hard drive and sending it as an email attachment. With each form, LiveCycle publishes an Acrobat document that collects forms as they’re returned to you, so you have all the data in one place. I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I believe the data can even be exported into Excel, CSV, or similar formats from Acrobat.
Easy Form Completion with Acrobat Reader
Of course, ease of distribution would be useless if recipients had no way to open the form. Thankfully, just about everyone these days has Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader, which is the only tool recipients need to complete the forms. I can add an “Email Form” button that opens up the default email client and attaches the completed form when my clients are ready to send it back to me.
Conclusion
I really didn’t want to build some complex web app to distribute questionnaires and keep track of the responses. At the same time, I needed a simple solution that collected all the responses in one place because I’m completely obsessed with organization. LiveCycle Designer does the job nicely.
Adobe Acrobat Pro
