Lines Under Text Field Forms in Word 2003

I've received many requests for assistance on Microsoft Word forms. By the way, I recommend using Acrobat 8.0 Professional for forms, but for those of you using Word - this week's tip is for you. You will learn how to create a text field form in Word with a line under it.

If you want to skip the following instructions and just watch the tutorial as a flash movie, go to: http://www.scripps.edu/hr/training/forms_lines.html
.
My sample document is a partially completed Word 2003 document with some form fields pictured below.

Unfinished Word form

We are going to add a text field form with a line under it by Email Address.

• Click View in the Menu
• Click Toolbars
• Click Forms on the drop-down menu from Toolbars

• The Forms toolbar appears

• Place your cursor where you want your form field and click once.
• Then go up to the Forms toolbar and click the Text Form Field button (first button [ab] in the Forms toolbar).
  
• A text form field appears shaded in – you can clear the grey color by clicking on the orange button with an “a” on it on the Forms toolbar.
• Click the Frame button on the Forms toolbar.

• The text form field is now enclosed in a frame and might have jumped to a different location on your document
• Drag it back into place
• Size it by clicking and dragging the border handles that appear as small squares around the frame
• After it is the size you want, right click the frame
  .
  

.

• Select Borders and Shading… from the drop-down menu
  
  

.

• The Borders tab should be open by default when the Borders and Shading dialog window opens
• Click the Top Border button in the Preview section (on the right) in the Borders tab to get rid of it. Next Click the Left and Right Border buttons to get rid of that part of the border.
  .

• Now the Preview window should display the bottom of the frame only.
• Click OK to close the Borders and Shading window.
• The remaining frame line will be the line under the text field form.
• Click away from the frame to deselect it.
  .
  .
  .
  
• The text field form now has a line under it that will stay with the form.
  .
  

• Finally to activate the form fields you need to protect the document: by selecting Tools on the menu, then Protect Document. In the Protect Document task pane under 2. Editing Restrictions, check “Allow only this type of editing in the document;” and select Filling in forms from the drop-down. Then click the “Yes, Start Enforcing Protection” button and choose a password if you want one. If you don’t want a password, just click OK.
  .
  

Protect Document Task Pane that will pop up on the right side of your document.

Of course there are other settings from which to choose in the Protect Document task pane but your form could be ready to distribute as is.

A good review of this tutorial is to watch the movie if you haven't already: http://www.scripps.edu/hr/training/forms_lines.html

Creating PDFs from Web Pages in Acrobat 8.0

Did you know that Acrobat can convert a whole website into a PDF? This is a very nifty feature of Acrobat 8.0.

You may have known that you can easily download a page from a Web site using the PDFMaker that installs in Internet Explorer, but you can also download a website or part of a website from within Acrobat and control its content and how it is displayed in the resulting PDF file (links and all).

PDFMaker in Internet Explorer

Here's how you do it:

Click the Create PDF task button and click From Web Page..., or choose File > Create PDF > From Web Page to open the Create PDF from Web Page dialog.

Create PDF task button

Specify the web page location (URL) and define the settings for converting a Web page to PDF in the Create PDF from Web Page dialog box (below).

Create PDF from Web Page dialog box

Access the file you want to convert in one of three ways, depending on the location and type of file. You can type the URL for the file if it’s on the Internet, click the arrow to the right of the right of the URL field to work with Web files that have been opened previously in Acrobat, or click Browse to open the Select File to Open dialog to locate a file that’s on a local disk.

Under Settings in the Create PDF from Web Page dialog box:

• Enter the number of levels you want to include, or select Get Entire Site to include all levels form the website.
• Stay On Same Path - Downloads only web pages subordinate to the specified URL.
• Stay on Same Server - Downloads only web pages stored on the same server.
  

Click Create to start the conversion process. The Download Status dialog shows you the number of connections active in the downloaded material, as well as the names, sizes, and locations of the files. When the download is complete, Acrobat displays the new PDF file in the Document pane and adds a document structure to the Bookmarks tab. Choose File > Save to save the converted Web pages.

PDF file in the Document pane and document structure in the Bookmarks tab

As you scroll through the document, notice that both a header and footer are added to the page. The header is the Web page’s name; the footer contains the URL for the page, the number of pages, and the download date and time.

Headers and footers are added in the PDF for each web page

Creating Forms Automatically in Acrobat 8

One of the coolest new features in Acrobat 8 Professional is the ablility to create a form from a document using artificial intelligence to trcognize fields automatically. Here's how it works:

1) Open the document in Acrobat 8 Professional – the form can be a PDF version of a document created in Word, InDesign, Excel, Photoshop, or even an a scanned paper document.

2) Choose Forms > Run Form Field Recognition. Acrobat processes the document and displays several features in the program window:

• The Document Message Bar, which shows the basic form information; click Highlight Fields to toggle the field background color on or off.

Highlight Fields icon

• The new fields added to the form are highlighted.
• The Detect Form Fields Report lists the identified fields; repair hints open in the Recognition Report panel.

Recognition Report

• The report can be toggled open and closed by clicking the Recognition Report panel’s icon. The panel displays in the Navigation pane automatically.

3) Choose View > Navigation Panels > Fields to open the Fields panel (Figure below). The fields detected on the form are listed in alphabetical order.

To open the Fields panel

4) The panel may be docked in the Navigation pane, or tabbed with other panels. To read both the Recognition Report and the Fields panel, drag the Field panel icon (Figure below) right to detach it from the Navigation pane.

Fields panel

5) Start making corrections in the form. In the sample form, section headings are defined as Text Box fields, for example, instead of being static text. You can:

• Select a field and delete it.


• Double-click a field in the panel to open its Properties dialog and customize the settings.


• Add fields as required for your project.


• Choose “Edit form in Acrobat” from the Options menu in the Fields panel to activate the Forms toolbar and the fields on the form.

To change the tabbing order, save and close the form. Then open the form in Adobe LiveCycle Designer and revise the tabbing order.

The Form Field Recognition feature is the most helpful when used on basic forms created in Word. It can be a real time saver when used with simple forms.

However if you have a lot of graphics or a complex layout, you might want to save the original document as a PDF and then open it in Adobe LiveCycle Designer (comes bundled with Acrobat Professional 8.0) to create the interactive form elements.

Save PowerPoint Slides as Images

Many people use PowerPoint to compose images because they are familiar with PowerPoint and due to time constraints, find it's more efficient to use instead of imaging software such as Photoshop.

After composing images in PowerPoint you may want to export the slides as images for use in other documents like Microsoft Word or Acrobat.

Here's how to export PowerPoint slides as images:

1) Open the PowerPoint presentation that contains the slides you want to export as images

2) Select Save As... from the File menu in PowerPoint


3) Use the Save as type: drop down menu to select either PNG or BMP files for documents that will eventually be printed. You can use the JPEG format for images that will be displayed on monitors, video projectors or for web use.

NOTE:
As noted in the above graphic, a PNG file will be about one fourth the size of a BMP file and will provide a print worthy resolution. So if you are concerned about the overall size of your document, a PNG file might be the way to go.

A BMP file usually is saved at 300 dpi (Dots Per Inch) by default and therefore is a high quality or high resolution graphic and will provide good print images.

When saving Word documents as PDF's, the amount and file size of the images in the Word document will affect the size of the PDF document.

4) After you select a file format, you will get a pop-up window that asks if you want Every Slide in the presentation or only the Current Slide to be exported as the file format you selected in the Save as type: drop-down menu in the Save As window.


5) If you select Every Slide, all the slides in the presentation will be saved as the chosen file type and exported to a location whose path will be noted in the next window. (below) The default location is in the same folder as your presentation. PowerPoint will make a separate folder for the images when you select the Every Slide option. If you save the Current Slide Only, only that one slide will be saved in your folder that houses your presentation.


6) And finally, make sure you note where you saved your images if you change the default path.

How to Change Case in Microsoft Word (e.g. UPPERCASE to lowercase)

Have you ever been typing away in Microsoft Word only to notice, when you took a breather, that all the text was capitalized because you inadvertently hit the Caps Lock key?

Well no problem, this can be quickly remedied. Just select the text and go to Format on the menu, select Change Case... and click on lowercase. This works on both Macs and PCs.

Here's an illustrated overview of that process:

1. Select the text.

2. Go to Format on the menu

3. Select Change Case...

4. Select lowercase in the Change Case window











Your text is now converted to all lower case.

There are five options in the Change Case window: Sentence case, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Title Case and tOGGLE cASE.

Examples of the five options:

• Sentence:.............
  
  
• lowercase:.............
  
  
• UPPERCASE:......
  
  
• Title Case:............
  
  
• tOGGLE cASE:....

Understanding Absolute Paths in Dreamweaver

Sooner or later you'll want to include hyperlinks (links) in your Dreamweaver webpages. Whenever you create a link to another page in your website you have to enter a path to that file or location. Images also have paths to their source. Dreamweaver manages these paths pretty well as long as the files are within your website folder.

Sometime you need to add links to web pages or files outside your website folder. This kind of hyperlink is called an absolute or full path. It is the full URL (Uniform Resource Locator, a pointer to a "resource" on the World Wide Web) to a web page. The path points to the exact location of the file on the internet. This type of file is always begins with the file transfer protocol (HTTP, FTP, File, and so on).

An absolute path is like a house address. For example: 3333 Sycamore Lane, Raffian, Ohio 44703 is a complete address.

The link to the Scripps TSR-EYE site (http://www.scripps.edu/services/tsr-eye/index.html) is an example of an absolute path. It contains the entire path to a file on the internet. If you use absolute links to other websites on your web page, be sure to check to see if they are still valid from time to time.

An absolute path or full URL can consist of up to five sections, listed below:

• Protocol - The first part of the URL is the protocol. It is http for web pages to indicate Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Sometimes you might want to link to a file on a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server (another method of communication over the Internet to move files to and from a server), using ftp instead of http as the protocol in the URL.

• Domain – The second part of the address is the domain. This is the name of the web server where the web page is located. The domain of the TSR-EYE link is www.scripps.edu. A colon and two forward slashes (://) separate the protocol and the domain.

• Port – An optional third part of a URL is the port. If the port is not specified, the default port for the protocol is used instead. The default port for a web server is port 80. When you enter http as the protocol, port 80 is implied and doesn’t usually need to be included.

• Path and filename – The fourth part of the address is the path and filename. The path includes all directories and the filename. In our TSR-EYE sample, the pathpath is /services/tsr-eye and the filename is: /index.html. Most web pages end in .htm or .html. Other common file endings are .cgi for Common Gateway Interface; asp for Active Server Pages; .jsp for JavaServer Pages; .aspx for ASP.NET files; .php for PHP pages; and .cfm for ColdFusion Markup language.

• Query string – The filenames might be followed by an optional fifth part of a URL – a query string. The query string is added to a URL to send data to a script for processing. The “?” tells the browser that the following part is a variable. Anything after the '?' in a URL is called the "Query string" A typical URL format containing a query string is as follows: http://server/path/program?query_string.
  
  The graphic below illustrates a URL with a Port listing and Query string.

The absolute paths to the YouTube videos are another example of query strings:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frvVJJv63gg (Link to a Dreamweaver tutorial about Defining a your Local Root/Site Folder)

You might see a URL that does not have a filename referenced at the end, such as http://www.scripps.edu/services/tsr-eye. No specific file is referenced in the URL, only the final directory is included ("/tsr-eye" in this case).This type of address works because the web server looks for a default page in the directory. Most web sites have a default page name that doesn’t need to be explicitly entered at the end of the URL. Usually the default page name is welcome.html, default.htm, default.html, index.htm or index.html. On some servers, any of these names will work.


Default pages in the root of a site are often referred to as home pages. To create a home page for a website, ask your webmaster or web hosting service for the default page name for your web server. If you don’t have a default page on your website and a visitor doesn’t enter a filename at the end of the URL, that person might see all the contents of your directories instead of a web page. Or the user might get an error message.


Most browsers don’t require that you enter the protocol into the browser’s address box to go to a web page. The browsers assume that you want to use the HTTP protocol to access a web page. However, if you are surfing to an FTP file, you have to enter ftp as the protocol at the beginning of the URL. Even though browsers assume HTTP, you still need to preface absolute links entered into Dreamweaver with http://.

Recall Email in Outlook

Have you ever sent email out in anger only to regret it later? Or maybe you made a mistake, like listing the wrong date or venue for a seminar announcement. Well you may have a chance to recall the email if you work quickly. An email can be recalled only if both you and the email recipient(s) are using Outlook and have Exchange accounts.

Here is an entertaining video on how to do that as well as how to set up a rule that will delay your email messages: What To Do If You Send A Kamikaze Email.

Check my March 19 blog for the detailed process of creating a rule that will delay all your email. Your email will stay in your Outbox folder for the length of the delay time specified by that rule and is easily retrieved before being sent.