In the first of our 5C’s under new features, we are going to start with create and there are a few things that Acrobat 8 can do that Acrobat 7 could not do. The first of which I am going to show you starts in word and it is pretty neat. What I just did was I opened a file. And if you opened a file to work along with me, you are going to see this too.

Let me explain what we have. This is a data merge or a mail merge file. It is looking for its data source and because you are going to be moving this to a different computer than I used, to create the file, it is going to ask you this question. So, all you need to do is click yes, click on desktop, in the project files, in part 1, look in the lesson 2 folder and there is a file called book1.xls. It is an Excel spreadsheet. This is the data for the data merge file and we will click open.

What we are going to do is that we are going to create a series of PDF files from these mail merge file. If you are not familiar with how to use mail merge in Microsoft Word, then it is something that you should experiment with because it is a powerful tool. It is not an Acrobat tool other than the fact that Acrobat can pick up from this tool and allow you to select Adobe PDF, mail merge to Adobe PDF.

I will select it and I can create a series of PDF files and this is what I really like. I can automatically send those Adobe PDF files by email. In the data source that I gave you for this mail merge are some email addresses. If you select that as the choice to where the email will be sent add a subject line. You can add a message of your choosing. I am going leave that one alone. If you click OK, Acrobat wants to know where to go ahead and put the PDF files that are going to be created because it needs to create them first and then I will hand them to your email client. I am going to put them right on my desktop so they are easy to find. While it is working, I will tell you that that is probably not a good strategy. Normally, you will put them somewhere where you can use them later. I am putting them there so that it is easy for me to find them for demonstration purposes.

Acrobat says that the emails have been sent successfully. That is not exactly true because what I first need to do is actually come over to Outlook. Look in the outbox and you can see that there are 12 email messages in the outbox ready to go. I will go ahead and open one of them and just show you the PDF file that it created because it used the data source to personalize the message, personalize the address, and the rest of this was the static content and the word files all jumped back over the word to show you that. That is part of the advantage of mail merging in general but what I am really about is the fact that Acrobat now can pick up form that and allow you to create a series of customized PDF files that is pretty good stuff.

Speaking of Microsoft, there is another new function that Acrobat offers to Outlook users. So, we will jump back to Outlook and I will show you that in Outlook under Adobe PDF, I can set up an automatic archival. In Acrobat 7, I could convert a group of email messages or a folder full of email messages to a PDF file and it would contain all of the bits and pieces of the email message that was important to me and the attachment, email addresses in the emails would become links in the PDF files. Web links would remain web links in the PDF as well. But, this is an automated way to archive your email with that technology. When I choose setup automatic archival, I can ask outlook to automatically archive a series of email files into a single PDF on a schedule. And so for example, I might ask it to back up weekly on Sunday at 12 in the morning so that it would not interfere with any of the work that I am trying to do. Create a log of that activity so that I can monitor any mistakes that might have been made or any failures that happened and I can also embed an index for a fast research. Now, embedding an index is something that I will mention as a side note.

When searching with Acrobat, you can create an inde