June 12, 2009

Five Upcoming Free Acrobat eSeminars in June and July

My colleague Mark Middleton and I are hitting the web to do five free, educational eSeminars on various feature areas of Acrobat 9 including digital signatures, security, forms, collaboration and PDF portfolios.

  • These 1-hour online events are absolutely free
  • All Sessions run  1-2 EDT / 12-1 CDT / 11-12 MDT / 10-11 PDT

During these events, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions via our chat pod.

I've included a summary of all of the events below and you can register for all of them (at once) using the link below.

Register for the Acrobat eSeminars

Here's the list of free eSeminars:

Tuesday, June 23rd
Adobe® Acrobat® 9 Pro: Top New Features
Tuesday, July 14th
Reduce Risk and Protect Documents using
Adobe® Acrobat® 9

Tuesday, July 21st
Creating PDF Forms
Tuesday, July 28th
Review and Comment on Documents with
Adobe® Acrobat® 9

Tuesday, August 11th
Share Sets of Documents using PDF Portfolios


I've included a description of each eSeminar in the full article.

Continue reading "Five Upcoming Free Acrobat eSeminars in June and July" »

April 8, 2009

Batch Conversion of Excel Files to PDF

I recently received the following inquiries from customers::

Some of my Excel files contain more than  one worksheet. I would like to convert the second worksheet in an Excel file to the same PDF.

I have over 1000 Excel documents to convert to PDF as part of a regulatory filing. Is there a way to convert these all to PDF in batch?

I'll tackle both of these needs in this article.

Converting Multiple Worksheets

Fortunately, Acrobat 8 and later can easily convert all of the worksheets in your Excel files to PDF:

Excel file with multiple worksheets

When you use the PDF Maker in Acrobat 9, you have some additional options to select just the worksheets needed:

Excel conversion window in Acrobat

A) Choose options to convert all worksheets, the currently selected worksheet or a subset of the worksheets.

B) To choose some worksheets, but not others, select from the list on the left and use the Add or Remove buttons to move them to the list on the right.

C) Click the Convert to PDF button to complete the process

The result is a nicely bookmarked PDF that looks like this:

A nicely bookmarked PDF created from Excel

What about batch conversion?

If you want to convert many Excel documents in batch to PDF, there are a few additional tricks involved. Read on learn how in the rest of the article.

Continue reading "Batch Conversion of Excel Files to PDF" »

March 30, 2009

Converting a PDF file to Excel Format

The pharmaceutical industry uses a lot of data. Consequently, we see a lot of tabular data converted to PDF documents. It is common to see lab instrument data, database reports and enterprise systems data output as PDF.

So, there you are, alone in your office staring at a PDF document wishing you had access to the original data. What do you do?

Fortunately, Acrobat 9.1 offers a couple of different ways to export to Excel.

  1. Select table and open in Excel
    This allows you to select a portion of a page and open it in Excel.

  2. Export as Tables in Excel
    This method uses some artificial intelligence to convert multiple page PDF documents to multiple worksheets in an XML-based spreadsheet file. It works best on files which were converted directly from Excel to PDF.

To open the XML-based file output generated using method 2 above, you'll need either:


Acrobat generally will usually do a pretty good job converting the text, but formatting and column widths will look different than the original. Acrobat only copies over the text. Formulas will not convert. Do not expect 100% fidelity.

In the full article, you'll receive my usual step-by-step instructions.

Continue reading "Converting a PDF file to Excel Format" »

March 25, 2009

Tips and Techniques for Deployment and Patching of Acrobat

Adobe recently released security updates to Acrobat and Adobe Reader 7, 8 and 9.

Large Life Science corporations centrally distribute software to users, most often on the Windows platform.

In this article, I'll discuss the tools and techniques that are available to help IT personnel deploy and update versions of Acrobat 7, 8 and 9, including the free Adobe Reader.

First, I'll show you where you can download the apps and our tools for deployment. In the full article, I'll discuss how to "chain" installs, expand Adobe Reader, and use the Adobe Customization Wizard to streamline installation.

Get the Updates and the Deployment Tools

Various updates are available depending on the version of Acrobat and/or Reader you have installed. To make it easier to customize Acrobat, Adobe offers installation tools which help you remove earlier versions of Acrobat, serialize the product, and set a wide variety of program options.

The links below are for Windows versions. Mac Acrobat users can find updates here.

Acrobat and Adobe Reader 9.1

Acrobat 9.1

Acrobat Standard and Pro 9.1 Update (Windows)

Acrobat Pro Extended 9.1 Update (Windows)

Adobe Reader 9.1

Adobe Reader Enterprise Edition (Windows)
The enterprise edition of Reader does not include Adobe AIR or Acrobat.com installations. Many firms don't want to install these anyway.

Installation Tool for Acrobat 9

Adobe Acrobat 9 Customization Wizard (Windows, FREE)
Use this tool to remove Acrobat/Reader 7 or 8 and above and to customize program options. The result is a custom transform file to use with the deployment tool of your choice.

 

Acrobat and Adobe Reader 8.1.4

Acrobat 8.1.4

Update for Acrobat 8.13 Standard and Professional

Previous Acrobat 8.x Updates available here.

Adobe Reader 8.1.4

Adobe Reader 8.1.4 Update (Windows)

Adobe Reader 8.1.3 Full Installation (Windows) is available from the Reader Download Center

Installation Tool for Acrobat 8

Adobe Acrobat 8 Customization Wizard (Windows, FREE)

 

Acrobat 7.1.1 and Adobe Reader 7.1.1

Acrobat 7.x

Acrobat 7.1.1 Standard and Pro Update (Windows)
This will update an Acrobat 7.1.0 installation.

Previous Acrobat 7.x updates available here.

Adobe Reader 7.x

Adobe Reader 7.11 Update
This will update an Adobe Reader 7.10 installation.

Installation Tool for Acrobat 7

InstallShield Tuner for Acrobat 7.0 (Windows, FREE)
This product allows you to install and deploy Acrobat 7 and Adobe Reader 7.


Adobe generally does not issue complete, new packages for dot releases, so it's important to properly "chain" these installs. I'll also discuss how to expand the Adobe Reader to make it installable, and discuss the Acrobat Customization Wizard and other resources available. Read on for this information.

NOTE: If you receive my blog via email, make sure you click on the article title to read it on my blog.

Continue reading "Tips and Techniques for Deployment and Patching of Acrobat" »

February 17, 2009

Materials for Using SAFE- BioPharma Digital Signatures in Adobe Acrobat 9

Today, my colleagues Mark Middleton, Ed Chase and I conducted a joint eSeminar with the SAFE Bio-Pharma Association called:

Using SAFE- BioPharma Digital Signatures in Adobe Acrobat 9

I'll post a link to the recording soon.

I've included three downloads that you might find useful:

  1. Adobe Acrobat Slides
    Go over the digital signing process in Acrobat

  2. SAFE Slides
    Covers the business benefits of using SAFE signatures

  3. Adobe LiveCycle eSubmissions Solutions Accelerator
    Slides on Adobe's server-based review and approval systems which can be part of an audited, CFR-Part 11 workflow

  4. Digital Signatures Cheat Sheet
    Helps you understand the various status messages associated with digital signatures

Read on to get the good stuff.

Continue reading "Materials for Using SAFE- BioPharma Digital Signatures in Adobe Acrobat 9" »