Welcome to Part 2 of our look at 25 cool Acrobat features. I hope you enjoyed the first part, and I’m sure you’re gonna love this installment, too. Here you’ll find out about some cool navigation tricks, how to manage mulitple PDF’s,  and how to use audio and video in Acrobat. And for all you traditional print designers, I’m gonna finish off with two must-know Acrobat commands that’ll make your pre-press life a breeze. So let’s get to it!

Secret #9: Articles: Navigatin’ Complex Documents With Ease!

This is a real neat one. Here’s the best way to explain it: in newspapers it’ll say “story continued on A15,” or something like that, right? Then you have to flip until you get to the right page. Well, articles in Acrobat'll let you simply click to jump to continue reading—it’s yet another way to nagivate through a PDF, and it works really well for newsletters or any sort of file that has mulitple stories within it. Head for the Advanced Editing toolbar (View > Toolbars > Advanced Editing), and click on the Article tool. Click and drag a box around the column of your first article; then navigate to where the article continues and drag a second box around that column. Keep dragging boxes for for each of your article columns; then when you wanna test it out, grab the Hand tool and give your article a click. Keep clicking to navigate all the way through the length of the article.

Secret #10: Wow, Convert An Entire Website to PDF!

This next one’s kind of a weird one, but cool none the less: you can convert not just a web page, but an entire website into a PDF. Sounds pretty cool huh? If ya think this sounds like fun, head to File > Create PDF > From Web Page. The rest is kinda self-explanatory. Throw in a URL, decide how many levels deep you wanna go, and hit Settings to decide how you want the conversion to go. Sound sweet? Only thing is, when the heck ya gonna need this? I used this once when I was on my way to New York, and needed to review the client’s website beforehand. I converted their entire site to PDF and reviewed it on the plane ride down. Cool huh? Beats the heck outta the in-flight peanuts, anyway!

Secret #11: Manage ‘N Navigate Those PDF’s With Organizer

Acrobat’s Organizer is awesome. It’s like a mini file manager, allowing you to browse through your filed visually. Choose File > Organizer > Open Organizer to get started. Once the Organizer's open, you can sort through, view, manage, open, and even print and email PDFs. Use the column on the left to choose how you want to navigate through your PDFs . Use History to show ya all the PDFs you’ve opened today, yesterday, or as far back as a year ago (holy hell!), or browse through PDFs by location. For example, see all the PDFs on your hard drive, or on a network drive. Finally, you can browse your files by using something called Collections, which are really cool—read up on ‘em if you have a sec. Now, once you find the one you’re after, double-click on that sucka, and he’ll open up in Acrobat, ready to go.

Secret #12: Use PDF Package To Make Your Proposals Sing!

PDF Packages are hard to describe, so you’re definitley gonna have to check this one out for yourself—but I’ll give ‘er a try. Do you ever have to submit a group of files to management or to a client? Something that you’d traditionally put into binders, with cover pages, and that sorta thing? Well, PDF Packages are the same sorta idea, but it’s all electronic, of course. So to give it a whirl, go to File > Combine Files; then click the Add Files button and add in all the files that you want as a part of your package. When you’re good, click on Next down in the bottom right. In the next screen, choose Assemble Files Into A PDF Package; then click Create, and Acrobat’ll create a package for you. Now, the important thing to know is that the files are not combined into one single file—they’re still all separate files, just organized into a package. See your files over in the left-hand pane? And you can have a cover sheet for your package, too. Click on Cover Sheet above the file list to have a looky. Pretty cool. Hope you like it!

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