Josh Hamblin, an STC-ETC member and employee at Coldstream Laboratories, leveraged his experience with creating fillable forms in Acrobat® and LiveCycle® to create a highly informative and interactive presentation. The chapter met upstairs at Barley's, January 19, 2010, to welcome Josh and several students from Dr. Russ Hirst's technical editing class who attended as guests of the chapter.

Josh first discussed form design, such as the advantages of left, right, or top alignment of labels to data entry fields and the completion times associated with each alignment; content grouping; a clear purpose for each data request; and no repetition of requests. He then compared the manual (not acceptable) way to create forms with the advanced, efficient way to use Acrobat, from design through data tabulation by exporting data to a spreadsheet. In a "hands-on" session, he showed how to create a form in LiveCycle.

Participants also appreciated his overview of how to use Acrobat Shared Review for simultaneous review of the same document and comment/version management. He also provided a handout with instructions on this process.

This program demonstrated STC at its best, which is peer-to-peer information exchange in a fun, conversational setting. We appreciate Josh!