Creating Forms - recommendation?

[lizat]

Dear madcaps,

Can you recommend somewhere to design forms that will be published on line as part of my Flare webhelp. The current forms are made in Excel and work perfectly OK but we wanted to investigate of there is a better option for publishing on line. I have Adobe CS10 so can use that but since I haven't used it for making forms before I am wondering what experience anyone else has had?

I should mention that we have two types of form. the first is quite simple and I imagine will give no problem to any form designer. However the second is quite complex where we have dropdown boxes, some of which are based on lookups and also offsets and matching.

Thank you.............................. liz

[nickatwork]

What do you want to do with the form when it is completed? Print, email?

You can create forms in html, pretty straight forward but in Flare you'd need to code it manually, I dont think it has any form input options.
Or you could create a PDF form and embed that in your page.

What are you looking to do with the information?

[lizat]

The form would completed & sent to a help desk. If it's excel it's as an attachment. If it is a pdf then i can tdo a mailto on the form. I am researching if a pdf can do the type of validation that I need, i rather suspect it won't. I just thought someone out there may ahve needed to do this before and have a view.

liz

[nickatwork]

I'd look more at the acrobat forums or google for the answer to that. Sounds like handling the form is fine, but what you want to do is more outside of webhelp and Flare in general but no doubt it is a valid scenario.

good luck.