Acrobat DC: The Creative’s New Best Friend

How Document Cloud makes your life easier.

Imagine you are a designer who has been hired by a food truck owner and chef. They’ve asked you to design the menu. Once the design is ready for review, how do you get their comments?

Traditionally, you might meet in person, share through emails, or even set up a server to share the files. It can be time-consuming and difficult to keep things in order and on schedule — especially when the menu might need to be reviewed by multiple people, all of whom are correcting the same spelling error and have different input. You don’t have time for this. You need to get *stuff* done. That’s why creative pros who want to streamline the review process use Acrobat DC. In fact, Acrobat DC is the second most frequently used Creative Cloud application.

Acrobat DC’s new updates just made your creative process easier. Acrobat DC gives you the tools you need to go digital, stay digital, work on the go, and speed up the feedback process — helping you to simply get *stuff* done (GSD). At Adobe MAX, Patti Sokol, senior solutions consultant at Adobe, and Keith Gilbert, principal at Gilbert Consulting, shared the good word of GSD with Acrobat DC.

Work on the go

You’re never really out of the office. The ease of mobile communication means you’re always expected to be connected. So, you should be able to do your work on the devices you always have with you.

“I want to be productive with the device that I have in my hand or in my pocket. That means scanning, converting, editing, sending, and signing PDFs from that device just as I would from a desktop device and with the same amount of ease,” says Patti.

Acrobat DC allows you to do just that. With the Acrobat Reader mobile app, you can highlight text, add sticky notes, mark up documents, review documents, and collaborate with others in those documents — all from your phone or tablet.

With Acrobat DC you can also fill in forms from your mobile device. Skeptical of that tiny screen? “I can hardly text to save my life,” jokes Keith, “but I can fill in a form on my phone really easily. It’s amazing.” The more forms you fill out, the easier it becomes as Adobe Sensei machine-learning technology learns your information and detects what should go where.

Go digital — and stay digital

The days of desks stacked with mountains of papers are gone. With Acrobat DC and its mobile apps, you can go digital — and stay digital.

One essential app is Adobe Scan. You can scan docs and forms to PDF, convert JPG files to PDF, combine multiple files, save them to Adobe Document Cloud, and edit them on your device. And the app is completely free.

Keith loves using Adobe Scan for his expense receipts. “I have an expensive document scanner in my office that is made just for scanning receipts and stuff like that. And I used to come back from a trip and throw my receipts in there. It does a great job… but it’s collecting dust now. I don’t use the document scanner any more for receipts because Adobe Scan is just so convenient,” says Keith. You can scan receipts while you’re waiting at a restaurant or waiting for your rideshare. It’s that simple.

And on top of all that, Adobe Sensei takes Adobe Scan capabilities to the next level. Using Sensei-powered optical character recognition (OCR), Adobe Scan recognizes the text in your scanned documents and makes them searchable directly from your mobile device. That also means that if you scan something like a business card, Adobe Sensei will recognize the information on the card and give you the option to add that information directly to your contacts.

Speed up the feedback process

Getting feedback can be one of the greatest challenges to any project, but it doesn’t have to be. With Acrobat DC, you can speed up and streamline how you gather and implement opinions and ideas.

Forget emails with attached files or setting up servers. Everything can be done through Document Cloud. By simply clicking the “share” button, you can send items for review to all the people who need to see it, set a deadline for feedback, customize the accompanying message, and even set reminders for people to complete their reviews.

The best part? Your reviewers don’t need to have Acrobat, or even an Adobe ID, to leave feedback. All they have to do is click on a link and review in a browser, eliminating the barrier of “sign in” and “wrong applications” that so often thwart or delay the feedback process. The options and possibilities for this capability are endless. “No matter what the source document is, you can convert it to PDF and send it for review,” says Patti.

Additionally, you can receive notifications when documents are viewed and comments are made. You will get a notification letting you know each time someone comments. All of this keeps feedback happening in a timely manner.

If your source file was created in InDesign, you can import comments directly into InDesign and see them as you edit. “The comments now appear in a panel that floats over your layout. This way you can see the suggestions but still have total control. The application is not going to do anything to your copy until you want it to,” says Patti.

With Acrobat DC and its supporting apps and technologies, getting *stuff* done — no matter where you are — is easier than ever.

Watch Patti and Keith’s full Adobe MAX session and learn how Acrobat DC can help you be more productive. Read other Best of MAX articles and watch sessions and keynotes at Adobe MAX online.