Adobe Acrobat lets you define how to spread and retrieve filled-out data in many ways.

By using Adobe's Document Cloud services, you can send out the form and retrieve all data quite easily and as automatically as you want it.

But most of the time, forms are downloaded by users, printed, filled out, scanned in, and sent back to some email address. The receiver often collects all PDFs, and – oh the horror – prints them out again, and retypes the data in some Excel list...

Let's make this procedure a bit more 21st century, without getting too complicated.

E.g. users can hit a Send button, which lifts the data part (the so called and very small FDF file) from the PDF. The email will send these files to the receiver, who can gather all these FDFs, and use a very nice feature in Acrobat to merge FDFsinto an Excel file.

And this is just a simple, efficient and effective manual procedure. Using online databases, web protocols and queries, it can be a totally different story.

So the methods are various...

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst op Quora: How can I extract information from fields in a fillable PDF-form?"