Working with the navigation panels

We are going to look at working with the navigation panels in a little bit more depth now. The navigation panels are something you're going to need to utilize to be able to better get through your document and also to be able to see what is going on with the document. It's a nice telltale sign to see what kind of both bookmarks, interactive table of contents, what kind of signatures there are, if there is any attached file, etc. So the navigation panels are very important within Acrobat. If you have been following along, what I did was I went View, Toolbars, Reset to reset the toolbars as well as up in the menus, View, Toolbars, Default Labels to get all of our toolbars at the very top of the screen here back to square one.

The navigation panels are very, very important inside of Acrobat. I at least think they are, simply because on the left-hand side of your screen you'll see the Pages navigation panel. And the Pages navigation panel to me is important because you have the ability to see the thumbnails for the pages and if you click on a thumbnail it takes you to that page. So the Pages panel is just so much more than this. It's not just the way to navigate your document; you can also go through and in Acrobat 9 they have changed the interface just a little bit here. Navigation panels have what's called an Option button and it looks like these little gears up here.

And anytime you have a panel that you open by clicking on the icon, the options themselves will let you see a lot of the different things you can do in that panel. So the Pages panel is really important. It does show you a lot of things that you can access within the menus as well, but lot of things I use out here. When you open a navigation panel you'll also see to be able to close it. There is the icon over here. If I click on the Pages icon that will close the panel. By clicking back I'll see that an arrow also appears in the far right here. By clicking the arrow you can collapse that panel, and you see it says Collapse, so you don't have to see it again.

Your navigation panels, like I said, there is a lot in here that you can utilize, are located up in the menu. So let's take a look at that. Looking up under View, you'll see Navigation Panels and you'll see all the different navigation panels available to you. By default you've got several out here including Pages, Bookmarks, digital Signatures and at the bottom we've got our Comments as well as attached files. One of the things about navigation panes that we can do is we can actually reset them. So if you're just joining us, yours may look a little different but we can easily reset them so we all see the same thing.

By choosing Reset Panels, you're going to reset them back where they were when you first ever opened Acrobat and by clicking on the Pages panel, upper left here, it will open up that navigation panel and we could see a lot of different features here. When you open up a navigation panel, just on the right side of the panel here, you see like a little gripper, you can take these panels and make them wider or narrower depending on how much screen real state you need in the document. So for instance, if we have a document with a lot of pages in it and I want to be able to see a lot of the thumbnails to be able to navigate the document, you can drag the gripper just to the right of the navigation panel here, to the right, and it tries to fit more of the pages in there, the page icons. So you can see a few more. When you work with some of these other panels you may want to open up some things that are not available at the moment.

Or close some. To do that, coming under the View menu you will see Navigation Panels. Like I said, a lot available to us. So for instance, let's say I want to take a look at the document and I want to look at the layers available in the document. By clicking the Layers navigation panel, it will actually add it to the panel list on the left-hand side here and show you the panel itself. To close the panel, once again clicking on the icon to the left here in the list or clicking on the arrow in the upper right corner will collapse that. It's still available. And the thing about the navigation panels, as well as I should mention the toolbars, is if you set these the way you want them, opening them, closing them, etc., the next time you open Acrobat these will still be available.

So it kind of remembers what you have done to the workspace out here. Another thing we can do is if you want to work on these navigation panels you might want to not have it docked over here. You might want to do something a little different. So for instance, I've got the Layers panel here. Let's suppose I've got a big document and I want to take a look at the Layers panel, but I don't want to open a panel over on the left-hand side. By grabbing the icon here you can simply drag this out and what it allows you to do is it allows you to basically undock it. You can pull it off the navigation panel. That way you can have several different navigation panels open at once. So I could see my Layers, I could see the Pages and start to work that way.

Now if you want to close that free floating navigation panel, which is kind of just hanging out here, there is a little x in the upper right corner. By clicking on the x it will close that, and I will be able to see that it's no longer available. A nice quick shortcut if you do use navigation panels quite a bit, which I imagine you will, come into Navigation Panel area in the left-hand side here. If you right-click on Windows or Ctrl+Click on Mac you will see that you have the same features as you saw under View, Navigation Panels. So we have a little context menu here, which allows us to open up any one of the panels. You can also easily reset them or you can hide them.

So hide navigation panels. Nice easy way to kind of hide them out there. So choose Reset Panels. That will get them back where they were. It closes them as well, and you've got to leg up here on navigation panels. And it seems kind of silly, but by using them more effectively you're going to be able to navigate your document as well as see what's going on with the document. It's almost like a little telltale history of the file to be able to see what somebody has done, including layers, digital signatures, adding comments, attaching files, that sort of thing. So they are really important in your workflow and it's really important to understand how they react to how you work.