As an Acrobat consultant (I do Acrobat training and consulting, as well as, spreading the good word about Acrobat for Adobe) I live and breathe PDFs. I find very few people really know all Acrobat can do to save time and money. So much of software training, is just making people aware of all that can be done with an application, Acrobat in this case. Here is a list of my favorite features that are beneficial to every Acrobat user:

1. Creating PDFs from web pages, scans, email in Outlook, Office applications, images into PDF slide shows, and most any other file, if no other way than simply printing to PDF makes documents easy to access, archive, and share. PDF is the lingua franca of document formats. In most cases (somewhat depending on the final purpose), I prefer getting PDFs because I know it looks like what the author intended, particularly because it includes all the fonts. My favorite here is making a PDF from a web page. Simply copy the URL, File> Create PDF> From Web Page, paste the URL and the result is a PDF where all the links live and you can append more pages to the document or link to that page. It will also include Flash video embedded in the page. I use this all the time. It's great for research. Acrobat 9 does a much better jog of capturing a web page than previous versions.  

2. Combining multiple PDFs into a single PDF. This is a fast easy way to combine and organize documents. From simply combining invoices with expense reports to putting together a large research project. No format is easier to combine than PDFs. Taking this a step further, add headers and/or footers to the resulting PDF for more consistency and organization. You can also add watermarks and backgrounds, such as "Confidential" to all the pages of hte combined PDF.

3. Combining multiple documents into a single PDF Portfolio. For bigger projects that contain a number of documents that are better organized as single documents with a "PDF wrapper," Portfolios are the way to go. Portfolios can not only contain multiple PDFs but other file formats as well such as MS Office documents in their original formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) and many others, including video. In the case of Office documents you can even open the document from Acrobat, edit it in the original Office application, save it, and the Portfolio will update with the edits. Best of all, you can even create your own identity, a skin as it's known in Portfolios, and use it for all the Portfolios you create.

4. OCR scanned documents so the text is searchable and copyable. This isn't a new feature, but the new OCR engine, Clear Scan, in Acrobat 9 is faster and more accurate than previous versions. Many scanners use PDF as their default format, but it's still just an image until it is OCRed. I've even taken screen shots and OCRed that to save time retyping. The key here is to choose Clear Scan in the Edit Document> OCR Text Recognition> Recognize Text User OCR dialog. It isn't the default method. The other thing to be aware of is the images must be 144 ppi or higher to OCR.

5. Fill-able, Submit-able forms is something I do all the time (I create a lot of forms for Adobe, for example). There is nothing worse, when we are using forms, than a non-fillable form. The Form Wizard in Acrobat 9 makes is so easy, there is no excuse not to make the form fillable. Of course, the ease of automatice form creation does depend on the original form. You may need to do some or all of the field creation by hand. For more information on creating fillable forms, see Form_BestPractices.pdf in an earlier post.

6. Review and Comment workflow is one of the biggest timesavers in Acrobat, if only everyone would use it. Text edits, in particular, make updating simple and fast, plus with the Comment and Review workflow it's easy to do a "shared review" so everyone can see everyone's edits and all those changes appear on a single PDF. No more going through multiple documents and missing someone's edits. I have found this can save up to 80% of the time it takes to edit a document with a team of editors.

7. Search-ability is not a new feature but from my experience, it's not as widely used as Find which appears in the tool bar. With Search, you can search text in multiple documents and point it exactly where you want it to look. It will even search an entire drive or server looking for specific text within PDFs. With thousands of PDFs myself, I find this very useful and it's fast.

8. Redaction is another useful function I use on a regular basis. As opposed to everything I've noted so far, redaction is removing information from a PDF. A simple example is going back to my expense reports. Sometimes I lose a receipt and need it for my expense report. In that case, I download my credit card statement, redact the cc number and other expenses that don't apply to that job. You can even search for numbers like Social Security numbers, etc. It's fast, easy and handy.

9. Interactive PDFs are what I used to refer to as "compelling PDFs," PDFs that are more than just an electronic version of a paper document. This can be as simple as navigation, adding bookmarks and links, to page actions as well as video and audio in a PDF. Flash videos can now be embedded and Acrobat 9 is the first version to totally implement Flash. It's at it's least about readability and ease of use. Making compelling PDFs is the way to go if you want to more effectively get your message across. This is just the simple stuff on interactive PDFs. There is a whole lot more you can do, particularly in Acrobat 9, the first version to implement Flash into PDFs.

10. Acrobat.com is a great way to share and store large PDFs and other documents. It can also be used to track reviews and form responses. You can even create and share word processing documents (Buzzword), spreadsheets (Table), and presentations (Presentation). The best part is you can also share your screen with 2 others and it's all for free. You can get more functionality by subscribing at a modest monthly cost.

I've only hit on ten of the highlights. In writing this, I kept thinking of other features I use all the time. I'll have to do a second top ten soon. Stay tuned.