how to use Adobe effectively

One goes mad in Sussex

Adobe Acrobat – My personal journey

First a confession: my name is Simon and I have an accountancy qualification. As if that wasn’t bad enough, my business ekes out a meagre living providing training and consultancy services to professional organisations – mainly accountancy firms. As a result, I am always interested in products that might provide real, practical benefits for accountants, whether in practice or elsewhere.

Consequently, I was delighted to be asked to be involved in this new zone. Like I imagine many others, I have opened and viewed hundreds of PDF files, I have even converted many of my own documents into PDF format, including my quarterly newsletter. I’ve recommended Acrobat to clients to help them deal with various document distribution issues – particularly with regard to security and confidentiality. However, I’ve also been aware that Acrobat probably did a lot more than I ever realised. As I work on the content of the site, I will be learning more about Acrobat, and using many of its features in my own business. Hopefully, my experiences, achievements and no doubt also problems will help you assess, understand and implement some of Acrobat’s capabilities for yourselves.

The first stage of creating the PDF and Acrobat Zone was to have a close look at the software and see whether there was enough of relevance to the accountancy profession to make it worthwhile creating a whole zone devoted to the technology. So I turned to a colleague, Ian Campbell, and asked for a practical demonstration of some of the features in the latest version of Acrobat Professional. The software is all about dealing with information – both in the form of documentation and raw data. As such, it addresses a great many areas of vital importance to accountants – including document storage and retrieval, security, form creation and data collection and, of course, electronic document distribution. Importantly, given the profession’s obsession with spreadsheets, several features are aimed specifically at this area. It turns out that not only are there lots of relevant features, but several of them look capable of providing simple, effective and quick solutions to issues facing almost all businesses – including my own. We shall see.

Whilst for me, getting a new piece of software is like receiving a chemistry set when you’re twelve, more normal people should also find it very worthwhile to browse through the features and options in Acrobat Professional. Rather than wait for the full version of Acrobat Professional to arrive in the post, I downloaded the 30 day evaluation version so I could start exploring some of the features for myself. Unfortunately, one of the most immediate and practical features that I’d seen Ian demonstrate – the Typewriter tool – was first included with Acrobat 7.05, and the evaluation download was only version 7.0, so I had to update the software before trying it out. However, it was worth the wait and the Typewriter tool is the subject of the first zone step-by-step guide. I’d be interested to hear your views on whether it turns out to be as useful as I think.

Typewriter Tool


The first thing that struck me about Acrobat Professional was just how much more there was to it than simply creating documents in a standard format. Not only does the core process of PDF document creation incorporate far more power and flexibility than I’d imagined, but Acrobat also goes well beyond anything I’d previously associated with it in extending the capabilities of PDF documents.

To take a couple of extreme examples, far from being just a simple, static copy of a word-processed document, the PDF format is able to cope with animations, movies, sounds and even 3D views. Of perhaps more immediate relevance to the profession, Acrobat also allows you to turn existing paper-based forms into interactive, electronic forms and provides a wealth of features for retrieving and working with the resulting data. Over the coming months I will be looking at these features in much more detail, and also exploring many other ways in which Acrobat could contribute to productivity, efficiency and quality.

Within a week of my initial involvement in the project I have already used it as a quick and simple method of creating online order forms for my website and as a method of delivering short online training instructions with the benefits of small file size, interactive screen animations, and virtually universal accessibility. In fact, one of the only drawbacks about helping to create this zone is having to spend so much time writing about Acrobat rather than using it to improve and extend the services that my business provides.