An interactive PDF form is a great way of capturing information from a group of people and Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional makes the creation of these forms a breeze. It also has features for distributing the form and then tracking people's responses.

One of the main advantages of using PDF forms, as against, web-based forms is that the PDF will always look the same regardless of which operating system or web browser is being used.

When it comes to delivering PDF forms, there are more options than with a web-based form. You can email the form to your audience or perhaps include it on a CD or DVD.

The ability to create forms has long been a feature of Adobe Acrobat. However, Acrobat 8 Professional takes form creation to a new level in terms of ease and sophistication.

Forms can be now be created from scratch in Acrobat. Just choose Create New Forms from the Forms menu and choose one of the built-in templates. The form is then created using a utility called Adobe Life Cycle Designer then saved as a PDF file.

As before, you can use forms made in other software such as Word or QuarkXPress. However, now Acrobat has a feature for automatically recognising where fields need to be inserted and creating them for you.

You can also use a printed form as the basis for an interactive PDF form. Just choose the Scan From Paper option when creating your new form.

After you have created the basic form and perhaps had Acrobat automatically generate your text fields, you can add all the usual form controls, such as check-boxes, radio buttons and combo boxes. Then, to complete the form, you can add a submit button.

Traditionally, only a full version of Acrobat would allow you to fill out a PDF form and then save the form data to disk. With Acrobat 8 professional, if you click on the "Advanced" menu and choose "Enable Usage Rights in Acrobat Reader", people filling out your form with Acrobat Reader will be able to save their form data and email it back to you.

You can send your interactive PDF form to any number of users by clicking on the "Form" menu and choosing "Distribute Form". You can select a series of emails from an Outlook address book or just enter recipients manually.

Returned forms are saved in a special Acrobat file called a dataset. When users complete the form and email it back to you, you simply double-click on the attached form. Acrobat opens a special window marked " Add Completed Form to Data Set".

To complete your project, after you have received back all the forms you distributed, you simply open the Acrobat dataset and click on the export button to save it as a .csv file. You can then import this file into Microsoft Excel or Access for storage and/or analysis.