I have been working on a form for my office that has well over 800 fields, along with some text, and boxes/lines for formatting. This is all in 11 pages. Some pages are way more populated than others. Most of these are radio selection buttons in 3-option configuration, essentially Yes, No, and Maybe.
I edit it on 3 separate computers, all with the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Pro. 2 of these computers are Windows 7, and one is running Mac OSX Mavericks. The home Windows computers is very powerful and should be expected to handle large amounts of information quite well. I have good reason to believe that all these computers are clean, fresh, and up to date with all software and OS updates applied.
Weird problems have been popping up all over the place. The main problem is speed. No matter which computer the file is on, Adobe seems to be struggling with the amount of fields. This is unfortunate, as most if not all of the fields are considered necessary. Sometimes during a simple edit of a field's properties, the program will lock up and crash.
One page was getting so bad, that no matter which computer I was using, a simple edit would take over 2 minutes or the program would simply crash. To combat that, I made the page individually as a separate document and attempted to paste the information needed all at once and let it all process through. Almost every try would lock the program for an hour and then it would crash entirely. One time, it worked. This, however, caused more problems. All the radio boxes had lost their proper formatting, some had multiple overlapping formatting options at once, some were gone entirely. All were showing the 3-button link when clicked on, but in the Fields toolset and Tab Order section, none of the buttons were showing as associated to any others, and in Field selection mode they selected independently when normally they select as groups of 3.
To add insult to injury, Adobe Acrobat decided the file was corrupt and wouldn't let me save it. I think I was able to Save As to keep the broken version.
I went back to a previous version of the file (a few hours prior at least, this crash took most of my day's productivity from me) and started from before the paste. I did the slow process of one-by-one.
Finally, that was somewhat functional. Then I was instructed to change the format of the radio boxes from circles to squares with check marks. I was working on this in pages 3 and 4, and it was working fine. I nearly finish page 4, and go to check over the rest of my work again. Mind you, I've been in the mode to edit Fields, not Text. 90% of the text on about half of the pages was spontaneously invisible. Words and portions of words were here and there, but most of the text seemed to be gone. It was still selectable, as if it existed and was white on a white background, but changing its color to black again made no difference. I finally figured out I could make it visible by selecting all the text on a page, making it bold, and making it normal again. This kind of ruined some of the formatting, but I got the text back. This again set me back dozens of hours of work.
This program is frustrating the heck out of me, is taking me many more work hours than it should. I've lost count but I've spent, at a minimum, 300 hundred hours on this already. Even using my own unpaid time at home trying to make it work. What can I do to prevent all these seemingly spontaneous problems and the slow speed while still having the needed information on the document?
I welcome any advice this community can give.
-Emily