One of my conference sessions at the Acrobat and PDF Central Conference 2009 was on Extending Features in Adobe Reader (the presentation for that session will be posted soon). In that session, I discussed the importance of the "file preparation order" in Acrobat 9 Pro or Pro Extended for shared reviews with PDF documents that also need to be encrypted or certified.
Donna Baker posted an important tip to her AcroFacts blog about adding comments to PDF files:
Do you add comments like highlights or ovals, and then add a sticky note comment to explain the first comment? You don’t have to double up the comments like that. Instead, double-click the comment on the page to open a popup note, and type your message. Your users see a miniature comment talk balloon over the comment, indicating there’s an attached message.
It's a matter of personal preference, but if you want to get your message across in the comments you add to a PDF file, say as part of a Shared Review, this is the better way to do it. Otherwise, it can be hard for the person collecting comments and the other reviewers to see how the highlight or drawing markup you added is associated with the separate sticky note you then put somewhere near it.
In Part 1 of this article, I wrote about exporting comments in a Microsoft Word document to a PDF file with comments when using Acrobat PDFMaker. When converting Microsoft Office files to PDF documents it is important, possibly even critical, to preserve as much information from the source as possible, and to have the option to be selective about it: Acrobat PDFMaker can help you there.
But the really productive part is after you have received comments from others on a PDF version of the document, possibly via a Shared Review. That is the time you will want to apply - or integrate - the changes to the source Word document: you got it, Acrobat can help you out here too by exporting PDF comments from Acrobat back to Word.
[As I stated in Part 1, this method applies only to supported versions of Microsoft Word on Windows. Apologies to my Mac brothers and sisters.]
Before you get started, I suggest opening the PDF file with comments, going through the feedback and suggested changes from reviewers. This is so you ca determine what is exported to Word and then integrated for you [this is optional, but will save you some time later if you have a lot of suggested changes, some of which you know won't be integrated]. You can do one or both of the following:
With that done, let's get to work...
To get started, choose Comments > Export Comments to Word... in Acrobat, or if you have the Comments list open, choose Export Comments to Word... from the Comments List Options button.
What this will do is launch Microsoft Word, if it isn't open already, and now that you are there, open the "Import Comments from Adobe Acrobat" wizard [I know, I know, that's not the exact title of this article, but it is the same thing really]. If you are already in Word, or have the original DOC/DOCX document open, you can also go to the Acrobat ribbon (or menu) and choose "Import Comments from Acrobat..." under "Acrobat Comments".
If you haven't been through this before, a screen of instructions will appear first: click OK to continue. You will then see one of three possible scenarios, depending on how you launched the wizard:
Whatever gets listed there for files, you can change it by clicking on the "Browse..." button.
You can then choose what you would like to import to Word:
Finally for this part, as you can see from the previous image, you can also instruct the wizard to turn on Word's Track Changes feature so you can see what gets changed once the wizard has completed its task.
Once you are back at the start of the wizard, the real fun begins when you click the "Continue" button.
First, the wizard will go ahead and import all the PDF comments into the Word document (unless you filtered them using the options I mentioned before). You should see them over on the right hand side of the pages, as expected with Word comments, pointing to the location where they were originally added to the PDF file. You will get the best results here if the Word document was converted to a PDF file using Acrobat PDFMaker and was tagged, but it still works otherwise. The wizard will then report back on how many comments were imported to Word, breaking it up by Text Edits and Other Comments:
If you thought that was cool, just wait for the next part...Integrate Text Edits is the next optional step (click Cancel to skip it), and it does just what it says on the tin. The wizard will go through the imported insertion, deletion or replacement Text Edits comments, and apply those changes for you. Acrobat is even doing your work for you now!
You can apply or discard them one-by-one by clicking on the appropriate button. You can then either click "Next", or check the "Automatically go to next" option, and the wizard will jump to the next Text Edit comment and move the dialog and document so you can see the highlighted area to be changed. If you know you want to apply them all because you have already checked and/or accepted them in Acrobat beforehand, go ahead and click "Apply All Remaining".
You don't have to use what you see in the "New Text" field. As you can see in this example, a typo was missed in the original Text Edit comment: I don't believe the author of this document really wants to extol the virtues of causing unwanted and annoying color changes to garments, but would rather mention the commitment to environmentally responsible practices [granted, I am the one who made the mistake]. Just go ahead and type in to that field what the text should be, and that is what the wizard will use.
Once all the changes have been applied, the wizard wraps things up by giving you a final report on the text integrations it made, with a couple of tips for cleaning things up in your Word document via the Acrobat ribbon/menu, including merging tracked changes and deleting comment bubbles.
Now think back to what you just read or tried yourself, and how you would have gotten to that same result before. If you were lucky to have two monitors, you may have the PDF and DOC/DOCX files open side-by-side and visually scanned from comment to comment applying those changes as you saw fit. If you had only one monitor, it was either a) very large or b) you are beginning to wear out your Alt and Tab keys on your keyboard. You may also have printed out the PDF document with comments, or the Comments Summary from Acrobat, and visually scanned that for changes to make [not very (su)stainable]. Either way, it was a process that was certainly slower than using Acrobat's Export(Import) Comments command, and probably had a greater risk of introducing errors or missing important changes.
Give this real time-saver a try and see how it works out for you. Remember, for best results use a PDF document that was created from the same Word document using Acrobat PDFMaker - no refrigeration after opening required.
Adobe Acrobat 9 has review and markup capabilities. Microsoft Word 2007 has review and markup capabilities. Having said that, I am not going to go into a lengthy discussion of how one application excels in these capabilities over the other [phew!]. They are both great at what they are intended to do, and you can use both workflows together to help review cycles go that much smoother.
So how could you use them together? As expected, Microsoft Word can be used for seeing what's changed as you author the document and go through versions, and Acrobat to gather feedback from one or more reviewers where they all the see the same thing, including other reviewers comments, without changing things in the document and without having to buy additional software. As you go through review cycles and various iterations of the document, you can incorporate comments and markup between the DOC/DOCX and PDF files, as well as have Acrobat apply the suggested and accepted changes for you back in to the source.
I have split these tips in to two entries: first up, going from Word to Acrobat...
[I am using Microsoft Word 2007 for these tips, but you can certainly use earlier supported versions of Word too. Sorry my Mac brothers and sisters who use Office 2008: this doesn't apply to you. You can skip over this blog entry, but there are lots of others you can read instead.]
If you already have comments in the source Word document, you can include those in the resulting PDF file that you send out for review.
First go into your Acrobat PDFMaker Preferences, either from the Acrobat ribbon in Word 2007, or the Acrobat menu in an earlier version of Word. Click on the Word tab. Select "Convert displayed comments to notes in Adobe PDF" (it's deselected by default).
Once you have checked that off, you can then be more selective about what is converted to sticky notes in the PDF file. For each reviewer you can:
Click OK to set the preferences (remember that PDFMaker preferences are sticky and will be used the next time you create a PDF file from Word this way). When you create the PDF file by clicking on the Create PDF button on the Word ribbon/toolbar (don't create the PDF by printing to the Adobe PDF in this case), you will get a PDF file with the notes placed where you originally clicked to add a Word comment.
Acrobat will use the user name as configured in Word's options as the Author for the PDF note. The note Subject will be empty as there is no equivalent in Word comments. And Accept and Reject are not flags in Word as they are in Acrobat - accepting a Word comment just keeps it in the document - so that is also ignored.
I have to thank the Acrobat engineering for also remembering to set the opacity of the notes in the resulting PDF to 30%, otherwise the notes would be covering all the text!
Note that if you send out the document for a Shared Review, these comments will have a new Author (whoever initiated the review) with "On behalf of..." added to the note pop-up text.
[It's the little details that Acrobat 9 has that I personally love and that make all the difference.]
Stay tuned for part 2 of this article where I walk you through exporting PDF comments from Acrobat back to Word, and have Acrobat apply edits for you.
I was recently asked the question "how can we delete or add pages to a PDF file after it has been sent for shared review?". Good question that.
Firstly, a little background: when you send a PDF document to others for a shared review, you may have seen that Acrobat 9 (and 8) will lock the document down to prevent changes. This is to protect the "Enable for Commenting in Reader" functionality in the document from being accidentally removed or "damaged": this way, those who only have the free Adobe Reader 8 or 9 can participate as expected. And hence, you are unable to change pages.
In order to add or delete pages in this scenario, you have to end the shared review, and then start a new one with the modified document. This is good practice: it ensures all reviewers are looking at and adding comments to precisely the same file, helping the review go along much smoother. The Review Tracker in Acrobat 9 can help with ending a shared review, then starting a new one with the same reviewers.
If you don't have access to the original document, or you were not the initiator, you can still use the PDF document that was part of the shared review (the one that Acrobat created when you stepped through the "Send for Shared Review" wizard). You need to "disconnect" that local copy from the Shared Review. You can do so by choosing File > Save as Archive Copy... or by clicking on the server status button on the yellow shared review information bar at the top of the document and choosing "Save as Archive Copy..."
Acrobat will warn you that archiving the document means it is no longer part of a shared review, but that it will still contain all the comments that were added up to that point in an editable state.
Open that archive copy, which by default will have "_archive" appended to its file name. That may not be the one you see in Acrobat once you save the archived version - that is still the shared review document. And as you will notice, the archive version has no more shared review functionality, and therefore, no more security as a result of the enable for Adobe Reader. You are now free to go about doing what you need to do this copy of the PDF document.
Technical Evangelist Joel Geraci recently posted an article, video and a "kit" for Acrobat 9 deployment. He has included the Adobe Customization Wizard 9, which allows IT managers to set default configurations for both Acrobat 9 and Adobe Reader 9 on Windows prior to deployment, including document collaboration settings.
This includes setting the following collaboration and commenting features for all users whom the customized installer is deployed to:
There are a whole host of other settings that can be preconfigured using this tool, including a direct MSI installation table editor and a Registry key tool, so check out Joel's blog or go to the Adobe Customization Wizard 9 page here for more information, including a link to download it (it's free, by the way). Documentation on deploying Acrobat and Reader can also be obtained from the Adobe Developer Connection.
“The German team used to travel to Ireland to work through their edits with the designers.” Emphatically believing in and being passionate about your work are things I agree with, but even that quote struck me as a work process that could be addressed.
Does anyone here need to save some cash to pay off that moped you decided to buy in the middle of winter? How about a few extra hours a week to improve your Guitar Hero® record? Well these Adobe customers were not concerned about two-wheeled open-air transportation or addictive games (maybe they were), but they did save time and money when it came to document reviews and approvals using Acrobat 9.
Continue reading "Customer Spotlights: Document Reviews Using Acrobat" »
One of the standout new capabilities for Acrobat 9 and Reader 9 is the ability for up to 3 document viewers to share the view of the page that they have of the document. As Mac|Life magazine said "Running a Shared Review session that’s broadcast with Collaborate Live is an easy and powerful way to get a team working together—not to mention being literally on the same page."
Continue reading "Page View Sharing: Do You Have An Interesting Way of Using It?" »
Last week I was lucky enough to give four classes and a keynote (sounds like a movie title to me) at the Acrobat and PDF Central Conference 2008 in Minneapolis, MN. One of the sessions I attended was on Comment and Review Best Practices, which was very well presented by Keith Gilbert of Gibert Consulting. He shared some great tips for marking up documents efficiently which I hope to write about some more. One of the suggestions he had was to make sure that Callout Tool text box should NOT be placed on top of page content as you cannot see what's underneath it.
Continue reading "Could you step aside, please, I can't see!" »
So, here's the next area of Acrobat 9's new collaboration features I'm really excited about...the ability to comment directly on video. But it's more than just adding a sticky note to an embedded video clip...
Acrobat 9 will tie the comment or markup you add to the video to a frame and write the timecode in to the text pop-up.
Then, you click on a comment in the Comments pane at the bottom of the document window and jump back to that particular frame. To see it in action, click here to view a video tutorial.
Here's why I am excited about this capability...
A few things to keep in mind though. For the Adobe Premiere Pro users reading this right now, this is not the same thing as Clip Notes. That is specifically for Premiere Pro-based workflows. The other important thing is that this is for Acrobat 9 and Reader 9 only, as it uses the new Rich Media Annotation type for embedded video and Flash.
Feedback can never come fast enough, can it? We live in an age where we are overwhelmed with information, yet we still need more of it NOW! If you are that kind of person - whether you want to be or not - then Acrobat 9 has a capability for you: synchronized document views aka page view sharing. It's a capability we are so excited about, we just had to call it by more than one name. ;)
Until you try this for yourself, the only way to really understand it is to see it in a real-world scenario.
Here's a possible one...let's say I'm an architect for a new office building. The project manager at my client's location calls me, and leaves me a voicemail saying "Hey! We have a problem with the plans. Call me when you get this." We've all received those messages before, right? So, you start leaving voicemails or sending emails to each other, never really understanding what the problem is or what to do about it. So frustrating. So unproductive. So 2007.
What I really want to do is to have my customer show me exactly where in the floor plan they have a problem, as if they were standing next to me moving my mouse, rubbing my back (this architect is very close to his clients). Only problem is they are on the other side of the country, and I have a meeting in 15 minutes with Mr. Trump about a major construction project. How can we control the view we have of the document right in Acrobat 9 or Reader 9 without having to go into an online or real meeting room, so I can find out where to make the change quickly and accurately?
This is where synchronized document views comes in. It literally allows you to share your view of a PDF document with up to 2 other friends at the same time. You are actually controlling the view of the PDF file in their installation of Acrobat 9 or Reader 9 (yes, Reader 9 users can participate too).
Here is one way you can get to the command...from the new Collaborate taskbar button in Acrobat 9...
Watch this video to see how it works in action...
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Which might bring up a good question...why not just use the screen sharing option that's available? It's a good discussion point, but one reason is that anyone who is participating in page view sharing can quickly and with minimal fuss share the view of the PDF file they have with others. It's a conversation where everyone has a say and can contribute.
I think they call that collaboration, don't they?!
This has to be one of my favorite applications for the annotations in Acrobat 8, but has nothing to do with reviewing documents!
One of the most popular ways to publish and share content in the form of PowerPoint slides is as a PDF file. Makes sense, right? You can secure the file to prevent changes. Everyone sees exactly the same thing. You can include slide transitions and bullet-point animations. And more. But that's all for another time and another blog.
Many presenters, eLearning content authors, and Adobe marketing types like to (always?) put speaker notes with the PowerPoint slides. This is as a guide, for ancillary information, or in the case of those Adobe marketing types, telling everyone else in the company what to say. But converting a PPT to a PDF used to mean that those notes would either be "lost" or have to "printed" to PDF separately. Not any more.
PDFMaker's preferences for PowerPoint on Windows (sorry my Mac brethren) includes an option to "Convert Speaker notes to Text notes in Adobe PDF" under the Setting tab. You can get to this dialog box by either clicking on the "Preferences" button in PowerPoint 2007, or choosing "Change Conversion Settings" from the Adobe PDF menu in PowerPoint 2003 and earlier.
Click OK and the settings will remain for future conversions. Now convert to PDF from PowerPoint using the PDFMaker buttons or the Adobe PDF menu, and take a look at the resulting PDF file in Acrobat.
What you will now see on every page that has speakers notes is a PDF Sticky Note in the top left of that page (my Mac brethren, you can now come back into this conversation). If you hover over that Note or double-click to open its pop-up, lo-and-behold, there are the speakers notes from PowerPoint.
Now those notes will always appear on the page unless you delete or hide them all. The neat thing is that these notes are on a PDF Layer, whose view you can toggle on or off. Open the Layers Panel tab on the left of your Acrobat window and you will see a layer called "Background" and another called "Presentation Notes". Just as you would do in other Adobe creative tools that use layers, click the eye icon to toggle the display of the layers on or off.
By the way, the Background layer will show and hide any background graphics you may have had in your PowerPoint design. That's useful if you want to print the slides but don't want to use up all that expensive ink when printing backgrounds - yes, layer visibility can affect printing too! Look at the detailed "Layer Properties" under the Layers Navigation Panel Options menu button.
It's important to remember: Acrobat is not a replacement for tools like PowerPoint when it comes to creating presentations and eLearning content. However, it's ideal when it comes to being able to share that interesting and engaging content reliably across computers, networks and devices. The ability to then use that content in meaningful ways as a PDF just makes it all the more valuable.
It has just occurred to me that I've been writing about commenting and electronic reviews of PDF documents, without sharing with you all the different ways you can actually conduct and tracks reviews with others. Silly me. Unless of course, you'd rather just give feedback to yourself - how constructive.
Like the sound of one or more of these workflows? Good! You're about to take a step into a world where review cycles are fast, accurate, efficient and kinda fun. If you want to learn more, check out my video tutorials on Email-based and Shared Reviews.
We already had browser-based reviews from Acrobat 5.0, and then email-based reviews in Acrobat 7.0. So why do we now have Shared Reviews to deal with too?
A good question! It is an important one to consider if you are looking at standardizing on a way to conduct reviews on documents as quickly and as pain-free as possible.
If you are not familiar with Shared Reviews, then I am sorry to say this is not the blog entry to find out. But don't stop reading! There are lots of good articles and tutorials on the subject, including a video tutorial yours truly created last year, posted on this page, and an article on this very subject here from 2006 with Randy Swineford, Acrobat Product Manager.
So why are Shared Reviews the way to go...?
If any one of the above reasons seem compelling to you, and if you have not tried a Shared Review in Acrobat 8, it may be time do so. It really is easy to start a Shared Review session, and even easier to participate. Grab a document you are working on right now, convert it to PDF, and send it for Shared Review using Acrobat 8 to someone you know will give you glowing-but-constructive feedback, no matter how bad your writing skills are. Have fun!