How do I Edit an Existing PDF Form Without Losing Form Functionality

Question

I'm brand new to Acrobat but familiar and proficient with Flash, PhotoShop Premiere Pro, After Effects, Dreamweaver, Fireworks etc.
The company I work for sells office supplies. We sell 57 distinct items.  We have Acrobat 9.  I am designing a PDF order form with fields that can be emailed to our clients as an attachment.  They fill out the form, it calculates the total, they send it back to us, we fill and ship the order.  Basic and straightforward.
I can add form fields to my order/pricelist... not a problem.  The question is:
Once I have brought a PDF into Acrobat and add 57+ fields and calculations, which is a time consuming process, how do I edit an item price at a later date, if someone in the company decides to make a change to our pricing?
See..., If I save the original Microsoft Excel document as a PDF, Acrobat can't edit the text for some reason.  Something to do with "Renderable Text".  Now if I open the PDF saved from Microsoft Excel in Adobe Illustrator, I can use the text tool to make changes. That doesn't help me... just saying. Why can't I edit "Renderable Text" with the Acrobat Text Tool?  Someone in a forum stated that Acrobat is NOT a word processing program!  If that is an accurate statement, it would appear that Acrobat can at least work with base PDF documents to make certain types of modifications and add functionality.  Is that correct?
Here's the problem.  I create a PDF with form functionality.  Everything works great.  The boss says, I want to change the price of the scissors.  I can't change the text in Acrobat because of the "Renderable Text" nonsense.  Does this mean that I have to re-apply all of the form fields and calculations to the new base PDF document every time there is a minor change?  I know there has to be a simple work around.  Should I upgrade to a newer version of Acrobat?
Is it possible to save the original existing form functionality as a layer or overlay to be applied to the new modified base PDF document?   Kind of like so many other Adobe products do including PhotoShop, Fireworks, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Flash etc., so that all of the form functionality can be applied in one big chunk?  Premiere Pro has the time-saving feature of "Paste Attributes".  It's a real time saver.
It may be simpler to just direct me to a video that goes through the process of creating a PDF order form with fillable fields that multiplys quantity by unit price and totals one column.
I already created a prototype of the form in PhotoShop which can be saved as a PDF.  The finished order document appearance has 95 horizontal 3px wide lines and 6 vertical 3px lines, kind of like what one might expect to see in an Excel spread sheet.  The form also contains some graphics and unconventional text areas that acrobat could overlay text fields and everything would be fine.
With these great number of horizontal dividing lines, It doesn't seem practical or even possible to create the basic layout in Acrobat.  As I originally stated, I'm new to Acrobat and would like suggestions for a workflow that enables easy editing of an existing PDF document with form fields.  I want to avoid the monumental task of re-doing all of the fields and calculations.

Answer 1

For what you are trying to do that is probably what you want -- Replace Pages. There are a few more issues that you need to be aware of since this is a business form. If customers are using Reader XI, it is not an issue.
On the renderable text, can you see the text list when you look at the font tab in the document properties (ctrl-D)? If not, they you do not really have fonts to edit. This may be the type of fonts you used in the original or the way in which you did the conversion to PDF. You need to have fonts that are on your system and then be sure to embed them (otherwise others may not be able to read them because of different OS or such).
As to e-mailing the form, that is fine (though there are sometimes problems with various clients and PDFs -- but usually on the sending end).
For collecting the data you may want to try a different route. For users of Reader XI, they can save the form with the data. Prior versions could not do that unless you enabled the form for Reader. However, this latter process has a 500 form use limit -- A license issue. If the data is submitted, then it does not make a difference. The folks with Reader XI can still save the form with the data, others will have to print a copy for their records.
The data can be imported to the form on your end and so you would have the exact same results as what was filled out. However, the submission process should be set up to submit to a web script for your receipt and not use mailto. The latter has problems that you have no control over due to proper operation with the mail client on the user machine. Typically the mail client must be the default and use MAPI. In any case, it is not reliable (not for business use). So submission to a web script is useful. The data in AcroForms would be of the type FDF (or possibly XFDF). If for some reason use created the form with Designer, that limit any editing in Acrobat since it is no longer a real PDF, but an XML container that Acrobat and Reader can display and interact with, but not change. Again, submission to a web script is still preferred.
For dealing with a web script and some coding for various languages, you can check out the FDF Toolkit. It has been around a while, but should still handle the CGI needs of the submission. In addition, it has tools for adding the data to a database and other typical operations for data collection. You can save the FDF files and import them to the form and deal with the data there also.
The use of Replace pages would do the job if all your form fields will still need to be in about the same location. Form fields are mark up and the pages are referred to as the document. Thus the replace pages will just original page and leave all the form fields. You will still need to go back and fix the value within the fields themselves, but that is a field edit.