So let’s get started with an overview of Acrobat to get our feet wet to understand what the product is designed to do.

What we are looking at here is a folder full of files. In fact, it is the Lesson 1 folder of the Part 1 folder that is in the project files that you installed onto your hard drive. And, we are going to work on those to build a proposal that we are going to deliver to a customer. And by doing so, we are going to learn the 5 C’s, the things that Acrobat is really good at.

Now, we’re going to start an Acrobat demonstration in kind of an odd place. In that, we are going to launch Microsoft Word. And here, we have a document that we want to share as part of the proposal. It has some things about it that require me or at least encourage me to convert it to a PDF file. For example, I am using a particular typeface that I want to use. I am using a particular set of margins and line spacing and formatting and other characteristics that I want the customer to see. I don’t want to leave it up to them. And the fonts that they have installed on their system, I want it to be what I have designed it to be.

So to solve that problem, the first C that I am going to use in Acrobat is Create. And when I install Acrobat onto a system that has Microsoft Word installed, I will convert it to a wPDF button right inside Microsoft Word. So to create a PDF file, all I need to do is click that button. Acrobat will ask me where I would like to save the file. Why don’t we go ahead and save it right into the Lesson 1 folder to make it easy to find later. I am not going to but I could change the filename of the file. In this case, Acrobat assumes that I want to use the same name that the Word file hadn’t. That’s a correct assumption. So, I’ll click save. And, Acrobat will go through the process of converting it to a wPDF file. And then when it is done, for good measure, it will open it in Acrobat so that I can check the results to make sure that I am satisfied with them. In this case, I am. I have a file that matches exactly with respect to fonts and formatting and all of those things that are important to me. It matches the document that I started with inside Microsoft Word, except that now, I have a portable document format that I can give to anybody as long as they have the Free Reader. They are going to be able to look at this document and print this document and see exactly what it is that I want them to see.