Using Acrobat Forms and Databases – Lyn Price - Adobe Acrobat and PDF for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction - page 160

Collecting Data
Hooray! We have completed the form and sent it out to all our friends. Now our email box is full of
messages with an attachment named “Data form Survey1”. Now what do we do?
If you open an attachment, you see it is a collection of data, which is not very helpful, although you can
easily see how the user has answered the survey questions (Figure 11.25).
Acrobat 7 Professional lets you import the information from each return individually into the original
form. You can also send the data files to an Excel spreadsheet which then can be converted to a database or
manipulated in many fashions, which we are going to do.
First, save all your data files in a folder, because you cannot directly open the data files in Acrobat from
your email. Be careful while saving: when the data files are returned to you they are usually named the
same. Rename each file according to a preferred naming schedule. You should open the file and then save it
rather than saving the file directly from the email to save the data files in XML format (Figure 11.26).
Project Files
A set of data files for the form is available in the ch11 folder on the topic's Web site.
Figure 11.25 Returns are strings of data
Figure 11.26 Save the returned data files