Adobe Education Leaders

I have to admit, for a long time I thought that Acrobat was a boring (but useful) application. Acrobat sat on my computer like an obedient dog and, on my command, turned my Word and Excel documents into PDFs. Boring…but useful.

As I started to learn more about Acrobat I realized that it contained a slew of “hidden gems” under the hood. I also learned that you can make a button in Acrobat that can do just about anything.

- Submit a form via email
- Print button
- Open a file
- hyperlink to a web site
- Play, Pause, and stop a movie
- and more…
To get you started here is a simple tutorial for creating a print button:
1. Open or create a PDF document
2. Click Tools > Forms > Show Forms Tool Bar
3. Click the button tool (the “OK” button)
4. Drag out a button onto your document, the Button Properties dialogue will open
5. (General tab)Name the button – this is not the label that will appear on the button
6. Click on the appearance tab and select desired colors
7. Click on the Options tab and add a label – this is the text that will appear on the button
8. Click on the Actions tab. Make sure the “Select Trigger” dropdown displays the “Mouse Up” value
9. Make sure the “Select Action” dropdown displays the “Execute a menu item” value
10. Click the Add button and choose File>Print
11. Click the OK button and click the Close button.
12. DONE! Test the button by clicking on the Hand Tool (it looks like a white glove)
13. When the end user clicks the button the print dialogue should open, just as if they clicked File>Print

Posted by Scott Trudeau at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For some reason, educational institutions don’t like to take the time to run Form Field recognition before publishing PDF forms. Adobe Reader users will not be able to digitally fill out the form unless the form has had the fields added in Acrobat. Using the Form Field Recognition tool is ridiculously easy (Forms > Form Field Recognition).

If you don’t take the time to run FFR, at least activate the Typewriter tool for your Acrobat Reader users (Full-blown Acrobat users can activate the Typewriter tool anytime). The Typewriter tool allows text to be typed anywhere on a document.

To activate the Typewriter Tool for Acrobat Reader users:

1. Open Adobe Acrobat 8
2. Click Tools > Typewriter > Enable Typewriter Tool in Adobe Reader

Useless bit of information – The longest word that can be typed using only the top row of alphanumeric keys is “typewriter.” (I know your testing it out…now get back to work!)

Posted by Scott Trudeau at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I often find it necessary to single out various pages from a PDF document and combine them into another. For example, I may need to combine pages 3, 5, and 10 from a fifty page document into a new PDF.

Acrobat provides an “extract pages” option that allows you to extract a range of pages, but this option does not allow for the combination of discontinuous pages. However, you do have a couple of options.

Option 1 – Use the “drag and drop” method as described by the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog.

Option 2 – Use the “Create PDF from Multiple Files” option using the directions below (my preferred method)

Directions for Option 2

1. Open Adobe Acrobat 8
2. Click on the Create PDF button
3. Select the “From Multiple Files” option

4. The Combine Files dialogue box will open. Click the Add Files button
5. Find the PDF file with the pages you wish to extract and click the Add Files button
6. The PDF will appear in the Combine Files Dialogue, now to select the specific pages.
7. Click the Choose Pages button

8. The Preview and Select Page Range dialogue box will open. This will allow you to type in both a range of pages and non discontinuous pages. For example, if you wished to include pages 1 through 5 and pages 10, 11, and 15 you would simply select the Pages radio button and type 1-5,10,11,15. Cool!

9. Acrobat also provides a Preview tool to help select the correct pages.
10. Click the OK button.
11. The Combine Files dialogue will open and provide an overview of the pages that you selected.

12. From here, decide if you want to combine pages from another document or proceed forward by clicking the Next button.
13. Make sure the Merge files into a single PDF button is selected and click the Create button.
14. Sit back and watch Adobe Acrobat works its magic!

Posted by Scott Trudeau at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Photoshop Elements is an amazing program and once you get the basics down you can really “go to town” on your photographs. This short tutorial will demonstrate a few tips and techniques based around an Earth Day theme.

Skills:
•Text Effects
•Text Tool Tips
•Drop Shadow
•Quick Selections

VIEW TUTORIAL

Posted by Scott Trudeau at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

1.Tell a story.

Instead of simply burning a DVD of your kid’s soccer game (BORING) capture the highlights from the entire season and create a documentary. The NFL does a great job at this. They are able to take snippets of video throughout the season, add narration and music, and turn it into a compelling story. Of course having a voice like John Facenda (the voice of NFL Films) certainly helps.

2.Don’t Focus Only on the Positive

Success is great! Heck, who doesn’t like to succeed? However, some of the best selling NFL videos document football follies! Try incorporating a bit of life’s struggles into your videos; failure is often times waaaaay more interesting than success (at least on video).

3.Tell the “Rest of the Story”

Senior Jason McElwain scored 20 points for his high school basketball team. Big deal…that is until you hear the rest of the story. Jason was the team’s manager, not a player, and is autistic. His coach, Jim Johnson decided to add Jason to the roster for the last game of the season, entitling Jason to a basketball jersey and hopefully some play time. Jason went on to score twenty points in four minutes, and won his way into the hearts of sports fans across the nation. Without the details…you have no emotion!
- see the video on YouTube

4.Take the Road Less Traveled

My cousin invited me to watch a video of his honeymoon in San Francisco. I rolled my eyes, sighed, and prepared myself for home video boredom. It turns out that Matt and Julie are a bit more adventurous than your average honeymooners. At each location they would walk up to the locals and interview them (think Jay Leno’s “Man on the Street”). The best part of the tape documented Matt finagling a turn on a street performer’s drum set. It was both funny and interesting. It didn’t hurt that they spent a bit of time in post production cutting out the boring parts, adding music, and highlighting the interesting stuff.

5.Add Humor
I taught middle school and junior high science for six years. Hands down the best instructional videos were those starring Bill Nye the Science Guy. He seemed to have a short 20 minute, highly engaging video for just about every topic I taught. He incorporated humor and wacky (but relevant) experiments into every episode. The students and I loved Bill Nye.

So there you have it. My five tips for combating movie mediocrity. Anybody else care to share?

Posted by Scott Trudeau at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Photoshop Elements 6 has a slick new interface with loads of great tools to help with all your image manipulation needs. I just received my copy of Elements 6 and had to give it a spin.

I decided to create a photo collage using a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge that was taken in the wonderful city of San Francisco over the past summer. I suppose using the term “collage” is a stretch, as this project will only use a single photograph; however it will make use of Photoshop Element’s powerful layers functionality.

The final project consisted of 3 layers: a background layer, a duplicate of the background layer, and a Hue/Saturation layer. The background layer was converted to a black and white image while the copy of the background layer had a Hue/Saturation layer applied just above it to really make the colors pop.

For a step-by-step check out the Adobe Captivate video tutorial that goes along with this post.

Posted by Scott Trudeau at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)