2 Comments

Hi David, I appreciate your weekly emails which are very useful and store them for daily and future use. If you may answer a question, I would appreciate it, which is this:

When using several calculation fields using the Acrobat addition in the calculation tab, sometimes the calculation order gets out of whack and sometimes the calculation results will go unnoticed thus providing a wrong total. Can this calculation order problem be avoided by using a script in every field rather than using the calculation tab in Acrobat ? Thank you.

Expand full comment

Hi Alfredo, Thank you for the question. PDF forms have a calculation order which is set in the order that calculations were added to fields, whether those are custom calculation scripts in the Calculate tab, or "Sum of" and "Product of" calculations. If the calculation order is not correct it can easily be corrected as I wrote about in this article:

https://pdfautomationstation.substack.com/p/pdf-field-calculation-order-matters

All calculations run when ANY field value changes. If you don't need the calculations to run until all fields are completed, you can put the enter calculation script in a "Calculate" button. This way no calculations run when field values change, then they all run when the button is clicked. In this case the order would be set by the script as it runs from top to bottom. If you have any more questions feel free to comment under the relevant article, or any article for that matter. The easiest way to avoid calculation order errors is to check the order when all calculations have been set in the form.

Expand full comment