The Same Page

Commenting in Adobe Reader X

2011-07-19T19:34:00Z

One of the highlights for the release of Adobe Reader X back in October 2010 – amongst many – was that the Sticky Note tool and the Highlight tool are now always available for any PDF file: as long the document permissions allowed for commenting. But those are not the only commenting tools and functionality available in Adobe Reader X. In fact, the software has many more. But those capabilities are only made available when the PDF file being viewed in Adobe Reader X has been enabled for additional functionality using Adobe Acrobat X Pro (choose File > Save as > Reader Extended PDF) or Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions.

By default, all Adobe Reader X users will see the Sticky Note and Highlight tool in the Quick Tools bar and in the Comments pane on the right. But nothing more when it comes to the Comment tools. I’ve highlighted them in the screen shot below…

Once that “special sauce” has been added to the PDF file to enable additional functionality, then all the Comment tools, or Annotations, from Acrobat X become available in Adobe Reader X. That includes the Sticky Note, Highlight, File Attachment, Audio Recording, Stamps (including custom and dynamic ones), Insert Text, Replace Text, Delete/Strikethrough Text and Underline Text…

As do all the drawing markup tools: Text Box, Callout, Line, Arrow, Circle, Rectangle, Cloud, Polyline, Polygon, Pencil and Eraser tools are all there for a Reader Extended Document…

Depending on the features enabled in the PDF file, any related capabilities or tools are available from the Tools pane that becomes available on the right of the Adobe Reader X window for the Reader Extended Document. In this example, we can see that the “Add or Edit Text Box” (formerly known as the Typewriter Tool) and Analyzing tools are available in Adobe Reader X for this Extended Document…

One of the benefits of using Adobe technology to allow others to comment and markup documents in the free Adobe Reader is that can they can also participate in Shared Reviews, allowing them to see other reviewers comments and submit their comments online without having to email files back-and-forth, making reviews much more efficient…

If you’d like to find out more, check out the tutorials and resources available on the Acrobat User Community site.

Acrobat X Has Cleared The Tower

2010-10-18T18:14:10Z

Unless you slept in this morning, you would have seen that Adobe Acrobat X (not ‘ex’, ‘ten’), Adobe Reader X, Adobe SendNow and Adobe CreatePDF were launched today. My friends and colleagues on the Acrobat Solutions team are really excited, even after a long night watching the web sites and blogs and videos and Twitter feeds and [insert your favorite way to get news here] all go live.

So what’s new and improved when it comes to document collaboration with Acrobat X? I’m glad you asked. Here’s a little teaser:

Nice, seamless integration with Microsoft SharePoint (2007 and 2010) for checking-in and checking-out PDF files, including adding versioning information and document library properties.
A new Comments pane, that bring together into a single place all the comment and markup tools, the tools for starting and managing a review and the Comments list.
The Comments list has a quick search filter: start typing some text, and only those comments that have that text will be shown in the list and in the document. [I love that capability]
Adobe Reader X now has the sticky note and highlight tool always available for any PDF document that you can add comments too, and then save that. Sweet!

I invite you to check out the videos that have been posted on Adobe TV to see the software in action, as well as join us on October 19 and October 21 for some eSeminars over on AcrobatUsers.com. More information will be coming soon.

In the meantime, make sure you are already subscribed to the official Acrobat family blog and Acrobat.com blog (where you will usually find me writing these days).

Hold the phone! Recent study shows familiar collaboration tools still widely used

2009-10-26T11:05:12Z

What is the number one technology in use today for collaboration by employees in companies across the United States and Europe? According to a recently published study by Forrester Consulting, it is the telephone*. A close joint second are face-to-face meetings and email. Hang on! What about things like wikis and blogs? Sorry, Web 2.0 fans: their usage for collaboration within the enterprise is still relatively low, but will grow.

The study called “Building The Future of Collaboration” was commissioned by Adobe, and the goal was to learn how knowledge workers across Europe and more recently in the United States collaborate in the workplace. You can read more about the study here, and there is commentary and analysis on Lori DeFurio’s Adobe TV show and blog, and on Joel Geraci’s excellent “IT Matters” blog.

According to the study, 77% of U.S. respondents and 76% of European respondents use email with attachments for collaboration. By contrast, only 2% of U.S.-based respondents and 1% of those in Europe use wikis for collaboration in the workplace (blogs and social networks were not much higher than that). As expected though, usage of these Web 2.0-based technologies was higher among younger workers, as they are clearly popular tools once everyone goes home (unless your boss doesn’t mind you checking your Facebook page once-in-a-while during the day).

So clearly knowledge workers today still prefer traditional collaborative tools. Why? Because they are human beings. And as humans, we generally tend to favor what we are familiar with over newer alternatives. At the same time, these knowledge workers acknowledge that there are limitations with these familiar collaborative tools: among U.S. respondents, the top challenges with these current methods are that not everyone has the same tools (59%); that some tools add complexity more than help (32%); and tools don’t work together well (24%).

So, something of a paradox here: technology is both helping and hindering collaboration in the workplace today. This is where I believe Adobe Acrobat can help. Although Acrobat 9 offers to streamline the collaborative process of getting feedback and comments from others, even when they are in different locations and time zones, it does so in ways that everyone is familiar with:

the commenting tools look and feel like the paper ones we are all used to;
rather than using our email inbox to track who has responded (something email was never intended to do) we can use the Acrobat 9 Tracker to keep an eye on document reviews, yet still use email from there for communication and reminders (something email was intended to do);
according to the study, web conferencing and instant messaging are certainly more popular today: by leveraging Acrobat.com ConnectNow and Page View Sharing, Acrobat 9 can bring those methods of collaboration right into the familiar world of working with a PDF document;

What Adobe Acrobat 9 delivers on is being able to help everyone across the workplace be able to build a bridge from their current workflows to the needs of the future as technologies and their adoption change.

Click the linked image below to register for your own copy of the report. I hope it’s a powerful way to make your own case for using Acrobat 9 within and beyond your organization for collaboration (and many other) purposes.

* Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Adobe Systems Incorporated, September 2009

Shared Reviews with Secured Documents

2009-09-26T17:15:20Z

One of my conference sessions at the Acrobat and PDF Central Conference 2009 was on Extending Features in Adobe Reader (the presentation for that session will be posted soon). In that session, I discussed the importance of the “file preparation order” in Acrobat 9 Pro or Pro Extended for shared reviews with PDF documents that also need to be encrypted or certified.

Firstly, the order is important.

Encrypt your document, using password, certificate or LiveCycle Rights Management (née Policy Server) encryption methods.
If needed, certify or digitally sign your file.
Finally, send your encrypted document for email-based or shared review.

Secondly, you need to remember to give the encrypted document the right permissions.

If you are using password or certificate-based security, make sure the permissions allow for commenting…

If you are using Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management, make sure the policy includes “Collaborate” permissions for the users or groups who can access the file and participate in the review…

Why is this important?

In short, it has to do with the extended features for Adobe Reader that PDF documents enabled for shared reviews with Acrobat 9 Pro and Pro Extended (and Acrobat 8 Professional and 3D) will also have.

When opening these PDF files with extended features, also known as Reader Extensions, Acrobat will prevent changes to the PDF file, except for commenting (and form filling and digital signing if selected too). Therefore, you cannot encrypt a PDF document after you have enabled it for shared reviews (or just added Extended Features by themselves from the Advanced or Comments menus in Acrobat). The same applies for PDF forms that you distribute using Acrobat 9 Standard, Pro or Pro Extended.

Fortunately, Acrobat 9 will warn you if you try to encrypt a document that has already been enabled for shared review, forms data collection or extended features…

And you can see in the Restrictions Summary in the Document Properties dialog box that you cannot make changes to the PDF document…

Let me know how that works for you, and if you are sending documents for review securely.

Acrobat and PDF Central Conference 2009 Has Started!

2009-09-23T10:24:49Z

Today is day one of the Adobe Acrobat and PDF Central Conference 2009 in Minneapolis, MN. It’s been great to catch up with my AcroBuddies and meet the attendees, most of whom have not been to an Acrobat conference before. You can follow live tweets from the conference speakers and attendees by following the tag #pdfcon, or just by watching the live feed at http://www.acrobatusers.com/pdfcentral

Stay tuned for more…

Acrobat and PDF Central Conference Is Almost Here

2009-08-26T15:59:14Z

In case you had not heard yet, the Acrobat and PDF Central Conference 2009 in Minneapolis, MN is less than a month away. It will be one of those unique opportunities to learn much more – at one time and place – about what you can do with PDF and Acrobat to help you in your work.

If you are planning on being there, please do introduce yourself to me and the real PDF wizards who will be speaking, including Ted Padova, Duff Johnson, Lisa Croft, Thom Parker, Angie Okamoto, Bob Connolly, Keith Gilbert and others.

I will be leading sessions on Extending Features in Adobe Reader, Acrobat.com, Digital Signatures and Commenting and Reviewing Best Practices. But of course, there are lots of other topics to choose from

This is the third time I will be a speaker at the conference. Many of those who attended in the past have commented to me “I had no idea Acrobat could do so much” or “I needed to solve that problem recently, and did not realize Acrobat could have helped me”. It’s pretty cool to hear that from the perspective of someone who has been using and involved with Acrobat since 1996.

If you have not made a decision yet, or have not heard about the conference, and would like to attend, here’s a little secret: become a member of the Acrobat User Community (it’s free and easy, unless you are a member already) and you can get a USD100 discount of the regular 2-day conference pass price. Just go to this page on the Acrobat User Community site for the details.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Tip: Don’t Double-Up On Your PDF Comments, Double-Click Instead!

2009-08-24T16:34:14Z

Donna Baker posted an important tip to her AcroFacts blog about adding comments to PDF files:

Do you add comments like highlights or ovals, and then add a sticky note comment to explain the first comment? You don’t have to double up the comments like that. Instead, double-click the comment on the page to open a popup note, and type your message. Your users see a miniature comment talk balloon over the comment, indicating there’s an attached message.

It’s a matter of personal preference, but if you want to get your message across in the comments you add to a PDF file, say as part of a Shared Review, this is the better way to do it. Otherwise, it can be hard for the person collecting comments and the other reviewers to see how the highlight or drawing markup you added is associated with the separate sticky note you then put somewhere near it.

Acrobat and Word for Commenting Part 2: Export PDF Comments Back to Word

2009-08-24T16:03:29Z

In Part 1 of this article, I wrote about exporting comments in a Microsoft Word document to a PDF file with comments when using Acrobat PDFMaker. When converting Microsoft Office files to PDF documents it is important, possibly even critical, to preserve as much information from the source as possible, and to have the option to be selective about it: Acrobat PDFMaker can help you there.

But the really productive part is after you have received comments from others on a PDF version of the document, possibly via a Shared Review. That is the time you will want to apply – or integrate – the changes to the source Word document: you got it, Acrobat can help you out here too by exporting PDF comments from Acrobat back to Word.

[As I stated in Part 1, this method applies only to supported versions of Microsoft Word on Windows. Apologies to my Mac brothers and sisters.]

Before you get started, I suggest opening the PDF file with comments, going through the feedback and suggested changes from reviewers. This is so you ca determine what is exported to Word and then integrated for you [this is optional, but will save you some time later if you have a lot of suggested changes, some of which you know won't be integrated]. You can do one or both of the following:

Marking the valid ones with a checkmark by right-clicking the comments and choosing “Mark with Checkmark” or just clicking the checkbox to the left of the comments in the Comment List of the Comments Navigation Panel. Note that this checkmark won’t appear in the document when viewed by others. Otherwise…
Right-click on a comment and choose “Set Status > Review” and either “Accepted” or “Rejected”. You can also do this from the Comments List. Others will see this status for the comment as part of the review.

With that done, let’s get to work…

Export PDF Comments From Acrobat to Word

To get started, choose Comments > Export Comments to Word… in Acrobat, or if you have the Comments list open, choose Export Comments to Word… from the Comments List Options button.

What this will do is launch Microsoft Word, if it isn’t open already, and now that you are there, open the “Import Comments from Adobe Acrobat” wizard [I know, I know, that's not the exact title of this article, but it is the same thing really]. If you are already in Word, or have the original DOC/DOCX document open, you can also go to the Acrobat ribbon (or menu) and choose “Import Comments from Acrobat…” under “Acrobat Comments”.

If you haven’t been through this before, a screen of instructions will appear first: click OK to continue. You will then see one of three possible scenarios, depending on how you launched the wizard:

If you are coming from Acrobat in this step, the PDF file you had open before with all the comments will be shown under “Take comments from this PDF file:”.
If you launched the wizard from within Word and the source DOC/DOCX file was open, it will be listed under “Place comments in this Word file:”. By default, the wizard will look for a PDF file in the same folder and with the same file name, and if it finds it, lists that too. It’s assuming that PDF file is the one that has comments.
If you got to the wizard from Word with no file open, both fields will be blank.

Whatever gets listed there for files, you can change it by clicking on the “Browse…” button.

You can then choose what you would like to import to Word:

All Comments. This includes drawing markups such as polygons and callouts. If a comment or markup has a pop-up with text in it, then this will be made the text for the Word comment. The PDF comment or markup type, and the date that the comment was made, are also added to the Word comment text. For example, “Comment [08/21/09#3]:Highlight: The text from the pop-up.”
All Comments with Checkmarks.This will only include comments and markup that you checked off using Acrobat’s Comments List, for example.
Text Edits only: Insertions, Deletions and Replaces. This will just integrate the suggested changes to the Word document, and not just add the Text Edits as Word comments.
Custom Filters, for the comments you would like to include and apply. With this option you can be choosy about what is imported and applied to the Word document, including which authors comments you would like incorporated. For example, you can specify that only comments and markup that you have checked and accepted be imported by the wizard. Everything else will be ignored.

Finally for this part, as you can see from the previous image, you can also instruct the wizard to turn on Word’s Track Changes feature so you can see what gets changed once the wizard has completed its task.

Once you are back at the start of the wizard, the real fun begins when you click the “Continue” button.

First, the wizard will go ahead and import all the PDF comments into the Word document (unless you filtered them using the options I mentioned before). You should see them over on the right hand side of the pages, as expected with Word comments, pointing to the location where they were originally added to the PDF file. You will get the best results here if the Word document was converted to a PDF file using Acrobat PDFMaker and was tagged, but it still works otherwise. The wizard will then report back on how many comments were imported to Word, breaking it up by Text Edits and Other Comments:

If you thought that was cool, just wait for the next part…Integrate Text Edits is the next optional step (click Cancel to skip it), and it does just what it says on the tin. The wizard will go through the imported insertion, deletion or replacement Text Edits comments, and apply those changes for you. Acrobat is even doing your work for you now!

You can apply or discard them one-by-one by clicking on the appropriate button. You can then either click “Next”, or check the “Automatically go to next” option, and the wizard will jump to the next Text Edit comment and move the dialog and document so you can see the highlighted area to be changed. If you know you want to apply them all because you have already checked and/or accepted them in Acrobat beforehand, go ahead and click “Apply All Remaining”.

You don’t have to use what you see in the “New Text” field. As you can see in this example, a typo was missed in the original Text Edit comment: I don’t believe the author of this document really wants to extol the virtues of causing unwanted and annoying color changes to garments, but would rather mention the commitment to environmentally responsible practices [granted, I am the one who made the mistake]. Just go ahead and type in to that field what the text should be, and that is what the wizard will use.

Once all the changes have been applied, the wizard wraps things up by giving you a final report on the text integrations it made, with a couple of tips for cleaning things up in your Word document via the Acrobat ribbon/menu, including merging tracked changes and deleting comment bubbles.

Now think back to what you just read or tried yourself, and how you would have gotten to that same result before. If you were lucky to have two monitors, you may have the PDF and DOC/DOCX files open side-by-side and visually scanned from comment to comment applying those changes as you saw fit. If you had only one monitor, it was either a) very large or b) you are beginning to wear out your Alt and Tab keys on your keyboard. You may also have printed out the PDF document with comments, or the Comments Summary from Acrobat, and visually scanned that for changes to make [not very (su)stainable]. Either way, it was a process that was certainly slower than using Acrobat’s Export(Import) Comments command, and probably had a greater risk of introducing errors or missing important changes.

Give this real time-saver a try and see how it works out for you. Remember, for best results use a PDF document that was created from the same Word document using Acrobat PDFMaker – no refrigeration after opening required.

Acrobat and Word for Commenting Part 1: Export Word Comments to PDF

2009-08-21T21:29:21Z

Adobe Acrobat 9 has review and markup capabilities. Microsoft Word 2007 has review and markup capabilities. Having said that, I am not going to go into a lengthy discussion of how one application excels in these capabilities over the other [phew!]. They are both great at what they are intended to do, and you can use both workflows together to help review cycles go that much smoother.

So how could you use them together? As expected, Microsoft Word can be used for seeing what’s changed as you author the document and go through versions, and Acrobat to gather feedback from one or more reviewers where they all the see the same thing, including other reviewers comments, without changing things in the document and without having to buy additional software. As you go through review cycles and various iterations of the document, you can incorporate comments and markup between the DOC/DOCX and PDF files, as well as have Acrobat apply the suggested and accepted changes for you back in to the source.

I have split these tips in to two entries: first up, going from Word to Acrobat…

[I am using Microsoft Word 2007 for these tips, but you can certainly use earlier supported versions of Word too. Sorry my Mac brothers and sisters who use Office 2008: this doesn't apply to you. You can skip over this blog entry, but there are lots of others you can read instead.]

Export Comments From Word to PDF

If you already have comments in the source Word document, you can include those in the resulting PDF file that you send out for review.

First go into your Acrobat PDFMaker Preferences, either from the Acrobat ribbon in Word 2007, or the Acrobat menu in an earlier version of Word. Click on the Word tab. Select “Convert displayed comments to notes in Adobe PDF” (it’s deselected by default).

Once you have checked that off, you can then be more selective about what is converted to sticky notes in the PDF file. For each reviewer you can:

set whether to include their comments in the resulting PDF file
decide whether the notes should be open or not in the PDF file
choose the color the sticky notes will be (keep clicking the colored note to cycle through some standard colors)

Click OK to set the preferences (remember that PDFMaker preferences are sticky and will be used the next time you create a PDF file from Word this way). When you create the PDF file by clicking on the Create PDF button on the Word ribbon/toolbar (don’t create the PDF by printing to the Adobe PDF in this case), you will get a PDF file with the notes placed where you originally clicked to add a Word comment.

Acrobat will use the user name as configured in Word’s options as the Author for the PDF note. The note Subject will be empty as there is no equivalent in Word comments. And Accept and Reject are not flags in Word as they are in Acrobat – accepting a Word comment just keeps it in the document – so that is also ignored.

I have to thank the Acrobat engineering for also remembering to set the opacity of the notes in the resulting PDF to 30%, otherwise the notes would be covering all the text!

Note that if you send out the document for a Shared Review, these comments will have a new Author (whoever initiated the review) with “On behalf of…” added to the note pop-up text.

[It's the little details that Acrobat 9 has that I personally love and that make all the difference.]

Stay tuned for part 2 of this article where I walk you through exporting PDF comments from Acrobat back to Word, and have Acrobat apply edits for you.

Acrobat.com eSeminar: “Be More Competitive At Work”

2009-06-22T17:24:58Z

Tomorrow, June 24, at 12pm PDT, Erik Larson from the Acrobat.com team will be hosting and presenting an interactive eSeminar. That means it won’t be a one-way conversation, so bring your questions, comments and ideas.

Visit the Acrobat.com blog for the Meeting URL.

You can follow Erik on Twitter: @erikdlarson. I’m there too: @acroboy is the name you can follow.