Expert: Amy - 8/19/2007

Question
I'm designing Letterhead, Invoices & other documents for my friend's new
freelance business. The documents have been designed and saved using
Illustrator, but she does not use or care to learn Illustrator. How can I use the
graphics designed in a an editable document (ie: word, etc). She'll need to
insert text into various fields (ie: Billing Address, Job Description, Date,
Invoice #, etc).

Not sure how to do this .. ..

Answer
Hi Kristi,

I recommend chopping the forms up into graphic components, saving those components as tiffs and creating the forms by assembling the graphics together with editable fields (or spaces for her text) in a program your client will use, like Word or Excel. It's not as much work as it sounds like... It's fairly easy to insert a letterhead into a Word document, for example.

In short, that's the only way that you'll be able to create a form that the client will be able to edit and then re-save as a unique document for her records unless she has access to the complete version of Acrobat. If she had the full version of acrobat, you'd be able to save the files as PDFs and use Acrobat to insert the text fields where need be. While the files would be editable in Acrobat Reader, unless the client has Acrobat Professional, she would not be able to save the documents again. Something it sounds like she'd really need to do.

Hope this helps!
Amy