Donna Baker, author of Adobe Acrobat 7 in the Office, explains some of her favorite features such as the Organizer tool.Many people who have tried to find an easier, faster, better way to manage business tasks have relied on Adobe Acrobat Professional, and that, in turn, has led them to the work of Donna Baker, an information development consultant and author of four books on Acrobat.
Her latest is Adobe Acrobat 7 in the Office (Adobe Press), which presents case studies and advice to expand a reader's Acrobat horizons. PDFzone asked Baker a few questions about version 7:
PDFzone: What are some of the most important changes to Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional?
Donna Baker: There are so many. It's really like when Version 5 came out, which was a stellar change in the program. This is similar to that, in that it's a major step forward.
I like the fact that you can enable a reader file, and then there's the fact that the interface smoothes out in a number of areas. For example, the Organizer is a good tool. Also, the security content has been integrated into one window, and that's nice. Something else I like is the forms design.
PDFzone: What is it you like in particular about the Organizer tool?
Baker: It's funny, because I didn't use it a lot at first because it was a new tool, but now I find I'm using it more and more, and I like that it speeds up what I'm doing and makes it easier. For example, if I'm working on a specific project or set of files, I always make that into a collection now, because it's so easy to grab that set of files.
Adobe has made it really simple to use the Organizer to manage sets of files like this and use that in a workflow. There was this ability in past versions, but it's much more friendly to use in 7. Adobe seems to have become more cognizant of how normal workflows integrate into the interface. That's something that I just keep noticing with many of the new features.
PDFzone: Is there anything else that's been made easier to use, as opposed to being a new function or feature?
Baker: Definitely, they've worked to make many things more intuitive. The PDF optimizer is better in that way. Another feature in this version that is astoundingly useful is the accessibility wizard. In the old days—like, last year—you had to go through four or five steps, but now there's just one with the accessibility command. There's a whole feature in there now to build that wizard.
PDFzone: In general, what is it about Adobe Acrobat that inspired you to write four guides for it?
Baker: My publisher keeps telling me that I have a tendency to get evangelical about the program, and my only reply is "Hallelujah!" My passion for it hearkens back to the old days, when I was writing my college thesis and I had some charts I'd done in Lotus 123, and I had to put them in a Word file. Back then, there was just a big "X" to show where it would be integrated. I thought it was spectacular at the time, because of the object linking process.
As time has gone on, I still have that feeling of loving how content can be integrated from different places. I'm fascinated with how you can make all those elements play nice, and I think PDF is the key to this. There are some things I think Adobe can still do [to make it better], but in general, I love the program.
PDFzone: What advice would you have for Adobe for what's left to do?
Baker: It's not about their features so much as it is about their exposure. I think Adobe could be doing a whole lot more advertising, to get the word out about this new version, really make a splash with it.
In some ways, Acrobat is still changing from a high-end graphics product into a much more broad-spectrum program. Adobe needs to get people to the place where they can't imagine not having it, in the way that people can't imagine not having Word. But that's just me being evangelical.
