Free quick reference guides to popular software applications

CustomGuide, a computer software training company, have made available — for free — their quick reference guides for all Microsoft Office products, some other Microsoft products, some Adobe products, etc.

You can get these two-page illustrated guides here: http://www.customguide.com/quick_references.htm

[Links last checked September 2009; thanks to @onemanwrites for tweeting this site]

Read-aloud PDFs

Are you aware that PDF documents are readable by your computer? You can listen to any PDF instead of reading it!

In Adobe Reader, go to the View menu, select Read Out Loud > Activate Read Out Loud. Once it’s activated you can go to the same menu and select what you want read (entire document or just this page).

The read out loud option works best with PDFs that have been tagged. According to Adobe Acrobat’s Help:

In tagged PDFs, content is read in the order in which it appears in the document’s logical structure tree. In untagged documents, the reading order is inferred, unless a reading order has been specified in the Reading preferences.

Read Out Loud uses the available voices installed on your system.

If you can’t hear a voice, check your audio settings: Control Panel > Sound and Audio Devices > Audio tab — make sure what you’re listening with (e.g. a headset) is selected as the Default device for Sound playback. And check that you haven’t muted or lowered the volume!: Control Panel > Sound and Audio Devices > Volume tab.

If you don’t like the voice or its speed, you can change it here:  Control Panel > Speech > Text to Speech tab. However, the default voices in Windows are pretty horrible — if you really want to get into ‘text to speech’ listening, consider purchasing some better voices.

See also:

• Microsoft article on setting up and configuring Text to Speech (TTS) options in Windows XP and Vista: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306902
• Third-party products that work with the Microsoft Speech API: http://www.microsoft.com/speech/evaluation/thirdparty/engines.mspx (many have demonstrations of the voices available for purchase)
• Many third-party voices (as listed above) can be purchased from: http://nextup.com/ (e.g. Acapela and AT&T voices are US$35 each; Cepstral voices are US$30 each)

[Links last checked July 2009; prices correct as at July 2009]

Acrobat: Rearrange pages

Here’s a cool Acrobat trick — you can move pages into a different order, then save the changes. Very handy if you’ve inserted extra pages into a PDF then need to put them somewhere else, or if you’ve created a newsletter or magazine and for layout reasons want to move various pages around.

Notes before you start:

• As far as I know, you can only do this in full Acrobat, not Adobe Reader.
• Any page numbering added by the source application (Word, InDesign etc.) on the pages you move will now be ‘out of whack’. If you don’t have numbered pages, this is not an issue.

Here’s how you reorder PDF pages in Adobe Acrobat 9 Professional (other versions should be similar).

1. Open the PDF.
2. Click the Pages icon on the left sidebar — it’s the one at the top.
   
3. All the pages in the PDF are displayed, with a red border around the currently open page.
   
4. Click on the page you want to move and drag it to where you want it to go — a pale blue line indicates where you can drop it. In the example below, I’m moving the current page 5 between pages 3 and 4.
   
5. Release the mouse button when you come to the new place for the page. This drops it into that location.
   
6. Save the PDF and the page is now permanently in its new location (unless you want to shift it again later, of course).

(Thanks to David H on the STC Consultants and Independent Contractors SIG discussion list for this tip!)

Graph paper generator

Do you need graph paper for a project, or your kid’s homework? Can’t find what you want at the store? Or it’s midnight and the stores aren’t open?

Then try this free service where you select the type of graph paper you want, select the paper size, the dimensions, the color etc. and get a PDF generated of what you want, ready for you to print out and use:
http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/

Pretty cool!

[Link last checked May 2009]

Upgrade Acrobat 6 Pro to Acrobat 9 Pro

After a lot of trepidation based on my horrible experience last July trying to upgrade my old laptop’s copy of Acrobat 6 Professional to Acrobat 9 Professional, I bit the bullet on a recent holiday Monday and decided to upgrade my main PC to Acrobat 9 Professional. To say I was expecting a hours of frustration would be an understatement.

But to my delight, the process took less than an hour and went without any major hitches. And the minor ones that did occur were *my* issues not Adobe’s.

Here’s what I did to make this upgrade process as pain free as possible:

1. Found the old Acrobat 6 Professional serial number and wrote it down — this is needed later in the upgrade process.
2. Closed all open Microsoft Office programs and all other programs.
3. Created a System Restore point on the Windows XP machine.
4. Uninstalled all Acrobat 6 Professional software using Add/Remove Programs. HINT: Uninstall in order from most recent update to oldest (e.g. uninstall 6.06, then 6.05, then 6.04 etc.), then uninstall Acrobat 6 Professional. I’m not sure how much of a difference this made, but I suspect uninstalling in the reverse order that the products were installed may prevent problems.
5. Set another System Restore point (just in case!).
6. Turned off my spyware- and virus-checking software.
7. Installed Acrobat 9 Professional from the CD, entering the v9 serial number when asked. I got a message that Outlook was still open when it wasn’t (see Step 1), so I had to use Task Manager to kill the Outlook.exe process. It may have been listed because my PDA was still connected — I removed the PDA from its cradle too.
8. Everything appeared to go smoothly and I restarted the PC when asked to do so.
9. After rebooting, I opened Acrobat 9 Professional and was asked to register and activate the software. At this point I was asked to enter my Acrobat 6 Professional serial number.
10. I then went to Help > Check for Updates and downloaded the most recent updates (I had purchased this product in July 2008), and rebooted when asked.
11. After the second reboot, I opened Word and Outlook to confirm that the Acrobat icons and menu options were listed — they were.
12. I was told that the activation failed as there were already two machines where the serial number was installed. Well, the new laptop has it, and then I remembered that the old laptop was probably still activated despite all the problems I’d had with the installation last year. And that was the case. I was able to deactivate the serial number from the old laptop (Help > Deactivate — an internet connection is required for this process).
13. Once the deactivation was finished, I re-opened Acrobat 9 Professional on the PC and got a message about letting Adobe confirm that the deactivation had occurred, which I did.

And then it was all done! I did a quick test run by creating a PDF from a web page, and that seemed to work fine.

I felt much kinder towards Adobe that day! ;-)

Acrobat: Capture web pages

Here’s how to capture web pages and save them as PDF documents to read offline or to distribute to others. As with all new techniques, experiment first.

Example use: A client’s software product had received a great review in a online magazine. They knew that the review would not be “up” forever, so I created a PDF of the web page that they could distribute to their potential customers. I kept the headers and footers so that the potential customers could see where the review had come from.

Notes:

• If you are capturing pages from a website or a directory that is not on your own computer, then you must be connected to the internet or your network.
• You must have the full version of Adobe Acrobat—you cannot do this with the Reader.

This web page capture function has been available in Acrobat since v4.x; the instructions below are for version 6.x—steps in other versions should be similar.

1. Open Acrobat, then select File > Create PDF > From Web Page from the menu to open the Create PDF from Web Page window.
2. In the URL field, type the web address or click Browse to search for a local HTML file.
3. Select your Settings options for downloading the web pages. Be careful—if you don’t know how the web site is structured, there could be hundreds, even thousands, of pages! By default, Get only [x] levels is set to 1. This means you only get pages at the same level as the one you specified in the URL. DO NOT select Get Entire Site unless you know the site intimately.
4. Click the Settings button.
5. On the General tab, select HTML, then click Settings.
6. Use the options on the General and Fonts and encoding tabs to tell Acrobat how to display the web page content. Click OK when you’re finished.
7. On the Page Layout tab, set the page size and margins.
8. Go back to the General tab and select some or all check boxes in the PDF Settings section. Click OK to return to the Create PDF from Web Page window.
9. Click Create. Acrobat finds the web page(s), downloads them, and creates the PDF document.
10. Check the document. If you don’t like the fonts or page layout, then close the file without saving and repeat the steps above. Note: If you click on a hyperlink for a web page that wasn’t downloaded, Acrobat will automatically download that page and add it to the end of the document—that includes links to external sites.
11. When you’re satisfied with the PDF you’ve created, save it.
12. You can now use the normal functions of Acrobat to add your own pages, delete unwanted pages, create bookmarks, and so on.

[This article was first published in the March 2002 CyberText Newsletter; steps last checked January 2008]

PDF security

One of the great benefits of PDFs is that they’re (almost) universally readable. But sometimes you don’t want everyone to read your work.

Using full Acrobat you can password-protect a PDF, thus restricting viewing, changing, and even printing to only those who know the password. You can also prohibit text and image content from being copied and pasted. Your PDF document retains the settings you selected, even if it’s downloaded from the web.

As a user you might not be happy about some of these restrictions, but as a content owner, you may be pleased that Acrobat offers this sort of security.

1. In Acrobat (NOT Acrobat Reader), select File > Properties from the menu (or File > Document Properties in earlier versions).
2. Select Security, then change the Security Method to Password Security.
3. On the Password Security – Settings window, select the areas you want protected.
4. Click OK to close all windows.

Don’t forget—if you set a password on the document, you’ll need to remember it too, otherwise you won’t be able to open the document either!

[This article was first published in the June 2003 CyberText Newsletter; steps last checked January 2008 and rechecked in September 2008 for compatibility with Acrobat Professional 9]

Copy text and images in a PDF document

Did you know that you can copy text and images from a PDF document displayed in Adobe Reader? Most people think you can’t unless you purchase full Acrobat, so here’s how.

1. From the menu, select Tools > Select & Zoom, then choose the Select Tool (for text), or the Snapshot Tool (for an image)
2. Click and drag your cursor over the text or image you want to copy from the PDF file.
3. Once selected, press Ctrl+C to copy your selection to the clipboard where it’s ready for pasting into another application such as Word.

That’s it! With the Select Tool you will lose some formatting and tables, but you will get the text; with the Snapshot Tool, anything you select (including text) is converted to an image.

Update (3 November 2008): This no longer works in Adobe Reader 8.1.2, even though the right-click menu option would indicate that it’s meant to work.

[This article was first published in the September and December 2002 CyberText Newsletters; steps updated for Adobe Reader 8.0 in January 2008]

Acrobat 9 and Word: Outline numbering

There’s a trick to getting the numbers to display for an outline numbered Word document in Acrobat 9. I found the answer buried in the Adobe Forums:
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b5be3e

This is what you have to do:

1. Create a bookmark in the Word document (I put mine at the end and linked to anything on the Insert Bookmark list, but it doesn’t matter where you insert it).
2. Save the Word document.
3. Set your Acrobat Preferences for Word to Convert Bookmarks.
4. Create the PDF.
5. Check the Bookmarks—all your topics should now have their outline numbers! Yay!
6. Go to the end of the outlined numbered list where you’ll find the Word Bookmarks list.
7. Right-click on the Word Bookmarks list and delete it.
8. Save your PDF.

Now to solve the problem of why a default font like Arial Bold does NOT display in the PDF… [grumble, grumble, grumble] Well, I didn’t solve the font issue, but I worked around it. The font was set to Arial Bold, with a Bold attribute, so I changed the font to Arial with a Bold attribute, figuring that maybe Acrobat was hung up on a bolded Bold!

Acrobat 9 Pro and Word 2007

I’ve just spent wasted about four hours this afternoon trying to troubleshoot why Acrobat 9 Pro and Word 2007 weren’t playing nicely together on my new Vista laptop, when they seemed to be a couple of weeks ago. And after hunting and gathering information from Acrobat Help, Adobe forum sites, Googling, trying (unsuccessfully) to download a Microsoft Office 2007 “Save as PDF” add-on that Tom Johnson mentioned earlier this month, searching the PlanetPDF and PDFZone sites (gee, they’ve both gone very commercial these days), testing, testing, testing, and swearing—yet again—at Adobe, I FINALLY found the reason they weren’t playing nicely.

Problem

The test document I created when I had issues when installing Acrobat 9 was able to correctly create live Table of Contents (TOC) links in the PDF produced from Acrobat 9 Pro via the PDFMaker add-in in Word 2007.

But today I was testing other documents, and they just WOULDN’T display the TOC links no matter what setting I chose.

Reason

After a LOT of searching, I found that this is a ‘known issue’ (1678119) and is listed amongst many other ‘known issues’ with Acrobat 9 Pro on the Adobe website. The reason: The Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers check box was cleared in the TOC creation window.

Solution

Re-create the TOC for each of these documents, making sure that check box was selected. Save the changes to the template, if asked. After I did that, the TOC links all worked.

As an aside, I found in the Acrobat Help that the old check box for creating links from cross references and Table of Contents is no longer available in Acrobat 9 Pro if you’re using Word 2007 (presumably it’s meant to ‘just happen’). Another four hours productive time lost looking for solutions to problems that should never exist in software that costs this much.

Message to Microsoft and Adobe decision makers: Your fight with each other is hurting those of us who just want to produce decent documents for our employers and clients. Sort it out.