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)

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)

The new school year is upon us. The year will bring new students, new experiences, and new memories. Of course you will want to preserve your memories using a digital camera.

The way digital cameras name photographs has always bugged me. DC45000.jpg offers little clue to what event was being photographed. Renaming the photo to something like soccer-001.jpg offers a more descriptive name that will also prove more helpful down the road when you want to find the photos. Of course you can use the camera to set up the file name, but have your tried navigating your camera’s preferences to do this? What a pain!

I often take multiple pictures of a single event (say…a soccer game) and the Adobe Bridge helps me easily and quickly batch rename the files.

Here’s how:

1. Open Adobe Bridge
2. Navigate to the folder that contains the images that you wish to batch rename

3. You can select all of the images (Edit > Select All) or you can be more selective by Ctrl + Clicking (CMD + Click -Mac) on specific images.

4. After you select the images that you want to include in the batch rename select Tools > Batch Rename. You can also right click (CMD + Click) on any of the selected files and choose Batch Rename.

5. The Batch Rename dialogue box will open.
6. Select your Destination Folder. I almost always use the Rename in same folder option.
7. Create a filename. I like to use a text field followed by either a date or sequenced number (or both). You can add or subtract filename choices by clicking the plus or minus buttons. Look at the bottom of the dialogue for an example of how the new filename will look.

8. The following example will create a file name that looks something like this: July_4th_2006_001.jpg

9. Don’t worry about the Options section of the dialogue. I have never had to use any of these options.
10. Click the Rename button.
11. Done! That was easy. Now…get to renaming.

Posted by Scott Trudeau at 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The brackets tool works equally well in Photoshop Elements 5.0 - what a great tool. My students will be impressed that even Elements has these features.

Posted by Peter French at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I taught five years of math and science so I feel a bit out of my comfort zone writing this post. I was dabbling around with the Photoshop Elements 5.0 project creation tools when I stumbled on a neat interactive Flash photo gallery. The wizard allows for the easy creation of a “digital photo book.” The author can add photos, titles, and captions with a few clicks of a mouse; the reader can interact with the digital book by flipping the pages.

After a few strenuous minutes of deep thought (some people are marathon thinkers…I think more in short sprints), I figured the interactive book would make a great how-to writing activity. If I remember correctly, the how-to paper was an essential skill taught in my elementary and middle school days. It usually involved the following steps:
• Prewriting
• Drafting
• Revision
• Edit
• Publish
• Presentation

The interactive flip book would make a great prewriting activity for how-to papers. Students would create a digital photo gallery that would double as an outline for their how-to paper! After completing the “outline” (actually photo captions) they could add photographs using digital cameras. Finally, they could publish their projects to the web.

My finished example

See how it is done

Posted by Scott Trudeau at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional’s ability to use Microsoft Word’s mail merge functionality for PDF creation and email is both powerful and extremely useful.

Educators frequently send notes home that end up vanishing (usually found in a wad at the bottom of a backpack) before they find their way into the hands of parents. Why not distribute the notes via email and by hand? Acrobat 8 Professional makes it easy to email and print personalized correspondence using Microsoft Word mail merge technology.

At the beginning of each school year a teacher can spend a short amount of time creating an Excel database containing his students contact information. This small amount of work can yield high-dividends, as the teacher will be able to use (and reuse) the database to quickly create a letter in MS Word, personalize the letter with mail merge, and print and email the letter using Acrobat.

I often have teachers ask how I am able to “so quickly” distribute letters that include personalized student information. I smile and reply, “Work smart, not hard….let the computer do the work.”

Acrobat 8 Pro has the ability to use a Microsoft mail merge to generate and email PDF files to parents. Now parents have the option of receiving a letter via email or by hand (or both) with little extra energy from the teacher!

Check out this video tutorial to learn more about the process.

Posted by Scott Trudeau at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)