Create a drop down menu in a document

Pop-up menus do not appear to be supported in Pages, judging from the lack of a Cell Format Inspector button in the Inspector.

Search results in the Pages '09 User Guide returned a large number of hits for 'pop-up,' but a quick scan revealed none that did not refer to existing menus in the application, rather than menus added to a document.

A look at the five Invoice templates, the most likely of the templates to include pop-up menus, did not reveal any instances of the device being used.

Cells in Numbers '09 tables may be formatted as pop-up menus. You may be able to design your form as a Numbers document.

Regards,
Barry

I would like to create a drop down menu for things such as the date. I want to click on the menu and say, show January - December and then I click on the month. Is this possible?

Interactive forms are supported in the PDF imaging model. How much of the PDF imaging model is implemented in a particular application differs. If you want to work with interactive PDF forms, you will need a PDF creator that allows you access to those parts of the PDF imaging model. On the other, a free PDF consumer should plays your design, provided the features you use are supported in the version of the PDF consumer. If a PDF consumer is older than the version of PDF you have chosen to publish, the features will be gracefully ignored and the PDF consumer will draw as much of the page description as it is capable of.

/hh

Pop-up menus do not appear to be supported in Pages

One side of the coin is the application interface. The other side of the coin is the application-independent document model for distribution. The idea is not to distribute in application-independent document models, since this produces a combinatorial explosion whereby the audience has to acquire the same application as the author selected. The difficulty, then, is to know what the application-independent document models do or do not offer. Application-independent document models are not, claims to the contrary, anything at all like paper.

/hh

Where is the link with the missing of popup item in Pages and PDFs ?
The feature is available in Numbers which may also generate PDFs.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 15 janvier 2011 10:58:54

The feature is available in Numbers which may also generate PDFs

Suppose you have a steering wheel in front of your driving seat and you have four wheels standing on the road. From the fact that you have a steering wheel it does not follow that the two front wheels standing on the road will turn. In between, you have to have a mechanism that transfers actions on the steering wheel to actions on the wheels standing on the road.

Similarly, if you want interactive forms in the application-independent document model, it is not enough that you have a UI, you also have to have the UI work with the operators in the document model. This matrix involves the PDF Reference (version 1.7 and down), Apple's implementation of the PDF Reference (1.4 and down), and Apple's implementation of iWork.

The business model is that system software implements bare bones PDF, anything above that the customer is asked to purchase from third parties. This business model does not work very well for Unicode imaging (half the composition is unsearchable) or ICC imaging (no predictive proofing), but for interactive forms which are not in the domain of essential imaging, why not?

Perhaps there a (free) third party utility? Something that is not as costly as Adobe Acrobat Standard (unless design of interactive forms is now in Adobe Acrobat Professional, it's hard to say with all the product differentiation). Of course, one could also download a thirty day trial of Adobe InDesign CS and see if that will do the trick.

/hh

I'm tired to be asked to suppose what is boring you, I'm not your psychiatrist !

You are really obsessed by "interactive forms, independent document model".

As far as I know, it wasn't the OP's problem which asked only if he was able to insert pop-up menus in a Pages document.
He didn't wrote the acronym PDF.

Your high level rants may be interesting but as far as I know, they don't help the OP and the forum is dedicated to this task.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 15 janvier 2011 17:38:30

Question:

I am trying to create a form to use as a Lease Agreement. I would like to create a drop down menu for things such as the date.

He didn't wrote the acronym PDF

Correct, but menus don't drop down on paper forms, menus drop down in digital forms. There are two types of digital documents, application-dependent formats such as the Apple Pages format and application-independent formats such as Adobe PDF and Microsoft XPS.

Your high level rants may be interesting but as far as I know, they don't help the OP and the forum is dedicated to this task.

Apple and Microsoft are both selling application software that works with their system document services. It is by no means a rant to discuss how the application software relates to the system document services. On the contrary, it is central to selling and supporting software in information society.

Best,
Henrik

The OP never wrote that he/she wanted to print the forms.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 15 janvier 2011 19:13:05

I am trying to create a form to use as a Lease Agreement. I would like to create a drop down menu for things such as the date. I want to click on the menu and say, show January - December and then I click on the month.

The question was, Is it possible to create a drop down menu in a lease agreement, and let the person filling in the lease agreement open the drop down menu and fill in the details.

It does not say that the drop down menu is to be in print, because in print there is no such thing as a an interactive drop down menu. It does not say that the drop down menu is to be distributed digitally in PDF, nor that the drop down menu is to distributed in digitally in Pages.

But on the balance, Adobe advertises interactive forms in Acrobat (and has done so for many, many years). Apple advertises that iWork produces PDF. And the assumtion is reasonable that the question concerns creating an interactive form in PDF.

No?

Henrik 🙂

I am trying to create a form to use as a Lease Agreement. I would like to create a drop down menu for things such as the date. I want to click on the menu and say, show January - December and then I click on the month.

No mention in that paragraph of anyone other than " I" using the form; application independence is unnecessary. Should the OP return and supply information contradicting the assumption that all occurrences of " I" above refer to himself, suggestions of the need for application independence may be appropriate.

Feature not available in Pages, but is available in Numbers '09, an application in the same iWork suite as Pages '09—whoever has the first also has the second. Hence the mention of Numbers.

Henrik Holmegaard wrote:
The question was, Is it possible to create a drop down menu in a lease agreement, and let the person filling in the lease agreement open the drop down menu and fill in the details.

Same person.
...

But on the balance, Adobe advertises interactive forms in Acrobat (and has done so for many, many years). Apple advertises that iWork produces PDF. And the assumtion is reasonable that the question concerns creating an interactive form in PDF.

No?

No.

Regards,
Barry