Seattle Acrobat User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

April 20, 2006

At April's meeting, which was our second meeting, we had a guest speaker, Marty Mickelson from Adobe Systems. He spoke on using Acrobat 7 professional to create a fillable electronic form. Using this form in conjunction with a bar code made a shipping requisition complete.

Guest Speaker: Marty Mickelson on Adobe Acrobat Form Designer – Acrobat Professional has Form Designer and Acrobat Life Cycle which has a plug-in for bar coding.

Bar codes are a great way to speed up shipping. In dos shipping (used by DHL, etc.) bar coding looks like fast typing to dos. Adobe used to take 2 minutes to fill out a form and send on a package. Now with bar coding it takes only 20 seconds to do both. As you fill in the acrobat bar coded form the bar code changes before your eyes as you type. The bar code can then be remotely scanned and will automatically enter the data into a delivery friendly dos form. The average mistakes made during data entry is 7%. That will be eliminated using bar codes and forms that police themselves as data is entered. For instance 7% of the 3000 orders Sanmar takes daily is 210 orders with mistakes in them. This may mean that in the future call center people will not be needed. A quick overview of Adobe Form Designer also took users through some of the general features of the program.

Principles: Brian Wood, Adobe Creative Suite Master
Guest Speaker: Marty Mickelson speaking on Adobe Forms

Technical Resources

www.adobe.com/education/instruction/acrobat/tips
www.evolveseattle.com
www.acrobatusers.com