How to create a PDF Portfolio

How to create a PDF Portfolio

Annamarie Lukes – November 22, 2010

If you have a variety of information you want to share, you can clutter an email with numerous attachments or you can simplify life for your recipients by creating a PDF portfolio.

In this tutorial you will learn how easy it is to create an Adobe PDF portfolio in Acrobat X.

The first place where Acrobat X lets you make a PDF Portfolio is directly from the Welcome screen when you first start up the application.

Under Getting Started, go to Create PDF Portfolio.The second place where you can begin a PDF Portfolio is by going to the Create button and selecting PDF Portfolio.The third place to start a PDF Portfolio is under the File menu>Create and then PDF Portfolio.

Now let's actually create a PDF Portfolio

• Go to Create > PDF Portfolio and choose a layout for your portfolio.
• Leave the layout at the default, which is Click-Through, and then add files.
• Select the files you want to upload and click Finish.
• Now Acrobat has taken those four files and placed them into a new portfolio.

It is really easy to add or delete files to a portfolio

• Just right click any card in the portfolio or control-click if you're on a Mac and bring up the context menu where you can see you can add files or folders or you can delete.
• You can also delete a file from a portfolio simply by selecting the trash icon on the card and confirming that you want to delete.
• Another way to add content to your portfolio is to go to the Layout panel, the Add Content menu and select Add Files or Add Folder.

Let's jump over to the details panel for a few seconds because I want to point out how portfolios let you combine not just PDFs but a variety of Adobe file formats along with office and AutoCAD formats.

So you don't have to convert your Word or Photoshop documents into PDFs before you can bring them into a Portfolio; you can just add the native files.

Keep in mind that if the people with whom you are sharing your portfolio have the underlying applications like Illustrator or PowerPoint on their systems, they will be able to open up and work with the files that you include in your portfolio.

If they don't, all they will see is a preview of that file.Now let's go back to creating a PDF portfolio.

I have to select the Edit button to go back to Edit mode and now I want to show you that in addition to using all the Add Content commands, I can also just drag and drop a file.

So I'll grab a file here and just drop it in.

And notice I can drop it in wherever I want to in order in this portfolio so I will just drop it in here.

You can also use drag and drop to update the contents of your portfolio.

If one of your component files has changed, as long as it has the same name you can select the revised file, drag it into the portfolio and Acrobat will ask you if you would like to replace the file.

When you say OK, it puts in the new file and gets rid of the outdated file.

The details view also gives you access to your files for adding, deleting, resorting and updating them.

New in Acrobat X is the ability to append scanned information to an existing document within a portfolio without having to leave the portfolio to create a new document.

An interesting capability in Acrobat X is the ability to Add Web Content.

When I select that from the Add Content menu, a dialog box comes up, asks for a file name and a description which I will leave blank, a URL and then I select OK.

A new card is added to my portfolio that will take me to the website that I just entered.

Let's take a look at how that works.

First I have to go back into Preview mode.

Then I double click on the card and it takes me directly to the site that I just entered.

If you have a lot of content in your portfolio, you can make it easier for your end users to navigate by organizing it into folders.

In the Add Content menu, select Create Folder, enter a folder name and click OK.

A new folder has been added to my portfolio and I can simply drag files into it to organize them.Now you know how easy it is to create a PDF portfolio.