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Adobe Acrobat 9 Tutorials

Getting Around Inside Acrobat / Customizing Acrobat Toolbars

Subtitles of the Movie

Now, yet another way to customize your Acrobat working environment is to customize your Toolbars. In other words, which tools are available to you at any given time? So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go all the way up to the View Menu and then down to Toolbars and the command I'm looking for is all the way down at the bottom here, More Tools. Go ahead and choose him and I get this dialog box coming up. This is quite interesting actually. What I get inside this dialog box is a list of every single toolbar inside Acrobat. So there's my Advanced Editing Toolbar, there's my Analysis Toolbar, Comment and Markup Toolbar. I can actually scroll down inside this dialog box here and find all my other toolbars and then inside each toolbar I see a list of all of the available tools for that toolbar. Let's use my Advanced Editing Toolbar as an example here because I can see it down in my Acrobat interface there. So on the Advanced Editing Toolbar, these are the tools that are available and they're all turned On. Let's say for example, though, that I never use the Touch-Up Reading Order Too, for example. So I literally just uncheck that and let's say that I never use Buttons and I never use the Crop Tool either. I'll just uncheck the tools that I don't want to use and I'll click on OK and those tools literally disappear from the Toolbar. What I like about this is it really compacts the interface. In other words, get rid of the tools that you never use and only have available the tools that you always use. So let's take another look at that. I'm going to go back to the View Menu, back down to Toolbars and then More Tools. I'm actually going to turn those tools back on. There we go. Because I may wind up using them but there's a few other tools that you may want to experiment with. I'm going to scroll all the way down here. We have Attach a File. This is underneath the File Toolbar here; Attach a File. You may want to work with that guy. Organizer, quite useful. I'll scroll down a little bit more. A few tools that I really, really like are all the way down underneath the Page Navigation Toolbar: Previous View and Next View. I'm going to use those guys too. But you can take some time and experiment and turn on and shut off the different tools that you have available and you may discover some neat surprises that are available to you here inside Acrobat. I'm going to click on OK and, of course, my changes take effect there to the toolbars up at the top. Now, another way to customize the tools is rather than going all the way down into that More Tools Dialog Box, is I could actually right click on one of the tools inside of the toolbars up at the top and I get this sort of dynamic menu here where I can choose which tools I want to have turned On and shut off at any given time here; something like this. A little bit faster way to work here. Maybe I'll use the example of my Advanced Editing Toolbar here. I'll right click on any one of the tools along the Advance Editing Toolbar here and again, I could turn off that Crop Tool if I wanted to, turn off that Touch-Up Reading Order Tool if I wanted to and so on. Alright. So you can certainly experiment with that. Have some fun there. A couple of other neat things that you can do here, some keyboard shortcuts. If I hit F8 on my keyboard here, that completely turns off all of the Acrobat toolbars up at the top of the screen there; F8. I hit F8 again, everything comes back. So you can simply use your F8 to turn on and shut off your toolbars there. Now, on the Windows side, on the PC side, you could hit F9 and that would turn off your menus right across the top. I'm on the Mac here so on the Mac it's Command Shift M. So Command Shift M would turn on and shut off my menus at the top here or F9 would do the exact same thing on the Windows side. I'm not really sure why you would want to do this. Maybe if I wanted to hit the Command Shift M or F9 and then F8 and have a larger working area here. I can see more of my documents; something like that. But it's completely up to you. I just wanted to point that out there for you. So there you go. There's a look at customizing your toolbars here inside Acrobat.

Tutorial Information

Course: Adobe Acrobat 9
Author: Geoff Blake
SKU: 33985
ISBN: 1-935320-40-8
Release Date: 2009-04-10
Duration: 7 hrs / 106 lessons
Work Files: Yes
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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