Understanding the interface

We're going to look at the interface of Acrobat, and after this video you will be more comfortable with navigating any PDF file as well as finding tools for creating, editing and distributing PDF files. The interface itself has become a lot more user-friendly over the years and in the last couple of versions it really hasn't changed that much. And that's a good thing simply because it makes it easy for you to go to the next version. Now when you open a PDF file, and I have brochure.pdf open here, you'll be able to see that at the very top just like any program we have our menu items. Below the menu items we have our toolbars.

Now the toolbars themselves allow you to go in and create, edit, combine, secure, etcetera. You will able to see that the interface itself is a task-based interface. When you click on a button such as Combine, it gives you the ability to see all the features that you will be able to do to combine PDF files or other files themselves. They are trying to make it so that a lot of the features available, a lot of the tools available, are right here up in the toolbars. Now for navigating a file we have a lot of different toolbars we can use. I'll be able to see that we have zooming, etcetera, and we are going to get to those in the next videos.

We also have other toolbars, which are hidden out here, which you will be able to identify later on. Now on the left-hand side of the workspace out here, we will see our navigation panes or navigation panels. These allow you to do different things. For instance, by clicking on the Pages icon on the left side of the screen here we will see the different thumbnails of the pages. These show you all the pages within the document. Pages allow you to navigate the document by clicking on a single thumbnail. A lot of different types of navigation panels are out here for us to be able to utilize, try to get through the document or to see what's been done to the file itself, such as bookmarks, which are sort of an interactive table or content.

So there are a lot of things we can see in the navigation panels as well. In previous versions of Acrobat we used to see a lot of information at the bottom of the screen down here. Right now I can simply see the page dimension, when I bring my cursor to the very bottom of the PDF file itself, lower left-hand corner down there. On the left-hand side of the screen I will be able to see my Comments navigation pane as well as the Attachments navigation pane. By clicking on either one of these icons on the lower left-hand side of the screen here I'll be able to see these different panels pop open for me to be able to use.

When you navigate the workspace itself or to see the interface out here we have got a lot of tools that we can use. By using the interface more effectively you'd be able to navigate documents, find the tools you need and work smarter and faster within Acrobat.