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Adobe Acrobat 9: Adobe Giveth, & Adobe Taketh Away (but not really)
Having been an avid and regular user of Adobe’s Acrobat software for more than a dozen years, there are some tools on which I have grown very reliant.
Want to go to the next page? Click the right hand arrow on the toolbar and you’re there.
Want to go to the previous page? Click its neighbor, the left arrow button.
Want to go to the last page of the document in a flash? Just click the right-most of the 4 page navigation buttons–the right arrow with the vertical line. WHOAH… if you’re using Acrobat 9, you’ll ask yourself, “Where did it go?” If you’ve used Acrobat in the past, you’re not going crazy. That button had been there since the mid 1990s, but now it’s GONE.
Looking closely, you’ll see that Adobe has thrown you a bit of a triple-whammy here. Not only are you missing a last page button, but you will find that you are missing a first page button as well. Now comes the slam dunk… the next page button has changed its iconology completely and now is a DOWNWARD arrow. The previous page button is an UPWARD arrow.
No need to panic. When Adobe released Acrobat 8, they seemed to have favored a minimalist approach to toolbars. They did not remove any tools from Acrobat, but they sure did hide a bunch of them. The same philosophy seems to have been carried over to the new release, Acrobat 9 Professional.
Starting with the release of Acrobat 8, to see the full array of tools available on any toolbar, it was necessary to right-click a toolbar. This revealed a complete list of commands available on that toolbar. Commands with a checkmark were currently visible.
Those without a check were hidden, but one mouse click toggled the tool from hidden to visible. If you seem to be missing a toolbar entirely (such as the super-useful Advanced Editing toolbar), you only need to right-click in a blank spot of the tool bar area. A full list of available toolbars is shown–checkmarks indicate visible, no check means hidden. Click on a hidden one to add a checkmark & enable visibility.
Rather than going through each toolbar’s right-click menu individually (a rather time-consuming and tedious chore), Adobe has given you a way of showing, hiding and customizing ALL of the Acrobat toolbars at the same time.
Choose Tools > Customize > Toolbars to open this terrific set of options. Any toolbar with a checkmark will be visible, and any tool with a checkmark will be visible on that toolbar.
If you miss a tool that you think Adobe removed from one Acrobat version to the next, simply right-click. Chances are that the tool you are looking for is available, waiting for you to make it visible.
I found the icons, but is there a way to turn them back to left and right instead of up and down? This is just too confusing and I would much prefer to turn them back the previous way.
Not that I’m aware of, Casey, but let me check with David to be sure. If there is a way, he’ll post the answer below.
~Barb
Casey,
I am not aware of any way to re-skin the buttons. Sorry. I’m STILL not comfortable with this – after all these months & using the program nearly constantly 🙁
Hang in there – thankfully they still work the same!
David
Thank you very much for the first/last page icon tips. That has been quite distressing to me not to have them there.