PDF Calculation Tricks

Increase PDF form performance with these simple calculation tricks

Photo by Aditya Joshi on Unsplash

One of the first tools I developed when I started programming PDF automation solutions full time was to populate hundreds of PDFs with data from an Excel spreadsheet that had been saved as a tab delimited text file. The solution loops through all of the rows in the text file, imports the field data, and saves a populated PDF for each row of data. It worked well and it worked fast.

Calculations Can Really Slow Down A Form’s Performance

As the customer continued to request more logic and calculations be built into the forms, performance suffered significantly. Every calculation in a PDF form runs every time the value of any field in that form changes. So if you imported 25 fields and there were 25 fields with calculations, those 25 calculations would run 25 times for each field of imported data. That’s 625 calculations per row of data. That’s a lot of hour glass icons, hang-ups, and Acrobat-is-not-responding’s. Something had to be done. What if there was a way to turn the calculations off, import the data, and run the calculations only once at the end? (There is. Keep reading.)

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