Acrobat for Life Sciences

Documents submitted to the FDA's CBER and CDER must comply with the agency's PDF specifications regarding link appearance.

Both agencies prefer blue text for hyperlinks in PDFs created from electronic source files. For scanned documents, hyperlinks should be a thin blue line.

Electronic Source File

Scanned File

If you are creating documents in Microsoft Word, it is best to style the text blue, or edit your styles to include the color, then convert to PDF.

Regulatory professionals often have to work with scanned documents, or PDFs authored outside of their control. For these documents, a post-process is required to bring link appearance into compliancy.

In this article, I'll discuss how to change link color and style.

Continue reading "Changing PDF Link Color for Regulatory Submissions" »

Posted by Rick Borstein at 7:00 AM | Permalink

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: Office 2007 The free Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats for earlier versions of Office.

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" »

Posted by Rick Borstein at 11:21 PM | Permalink

I was at the ISI eSolutions show recently (great event, by the way) and at lunch I sat next to a regulatory publishing specialist from a large pharma firm.

She had recently migrated from Acrobat 5 to Acrobat 7. In the course of our conversation, I discovered that her department hadn't received any training on the transition.

Acrobat 7 introduced a new user interface and she couldn't find the Previous View and Next View buttons.

If you are migrating from Acrobat 5 or 6 to newer version of Acrobat, there's a good chance things will look different, perhaps a lot different to you.

In this article, I'll talk about how to get back the Previous View and Next View buttons, and also generally discuss how to customize toolbars to save time and improve productivity.

Continue reading "Where did my Previous/Next View buttons go?" »

Posted by Rick Borstein at 8:50 AM | Permalink