On Tuesday, I attended the Acrobat demonstration that I recently posted about. As usual Rick Borstein and Mark Middleton did a great job. Despite the fact that I had already seen each portion of the presentation as part of a webcast, there were still things that I learned that I would never had known had I not gone.
There is still time for you to sign up for the presentations in Seattle or San Francisco. I cannot urge your strongly enough to learn how to leverage the power of Acrobat.
Rick Borstein just announced that he is presenting 3-hour Acrobat demonstrations in Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Seattle. If you work in or near one of these cities and want to improve your Acrobat skills, you should take advantage of this opportunity. I have seen Rick present several times, and he always does a great job.
I believe that Acrobat is one of the most underused programs available. Use this opportunity to change that fact in your office.
One of my favorite features in Adobe Acrobat is its ability to add Bates numbers to hundreds of pages in less than a minute. Another great feature built into the Bates numbering feature is that, because Acrobat stores the Bates numbering information as metadata, it allows you to remove the Bates number from the documents. This is particularly convenient if you find that you want to reorder your documents before you produce your documents to the other side.
The downside of this flexibility, of course, is the fact that if you send these documents to someone else, then they can also modify your Bates numbers. Fortunately, this issue is one that is easy to solve and Rick Borstein explains how in a post on his Acrobat for Legal Professionals Blog. As Rick explains:
The ability to remove Bates Numbers is valuable in case you make a mistake during the numbering process. However, due to the adversarial nature of the legal business, attorneys may desire to limit what the other side can do with documents.
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In this article, I’ll discuss how to “lock down” Bates Numbers so that they cannot be removed by Acrobat’s “Remove Bates” option.
In his post, Rick explains to how protect your Bates numbers in both a single documents and in multiple documents. Check out the entire post for his easy to follow instructions.
John Heckman has recently gathered together some links to site with tips on how to use Microsoft Word more effectively. These include a link to 221 MS Word Keyboard Shortcuts. I cannot stress how advantageous using keyboard shortcuts can be for you. Not only does it allow you to increase your typing speed (because your fingers do not leave the keyboard), but it also keeps you from using the mouse (most people do not have an ergonomically friendly mouse).
The comments also contain a link to CompuSavvy’s Word & WordPerfect Tips, which contains a variety of tips to help with problems in both Word and WordPerfect.
The important thing to remember is that if you are having problems with Word, don’t bash your head against the desk. Chances are that there is someone who has encountered the same problem that you have and has posted a solution to that problem. Checking sites such as these as well as doing a little google research will often allow your to ferret out the answer to your problem.
Nerino Petro points us toward a new Firefox extension that is designed to help make public records freely accessible. The extension works by saving a copy of each document you download from PACER into a free database. This is an interesting concept and I am wondering how well it will succeed.
You can find out more information about the extension (called Recap) here.
Also, if you have not been to Nerino’s website recently, you should stop by. He recently updated the site with a new theme that looks absolutely great. I find it much easier to read than the old design.
Often people do not use Word correctly because they do not understand how the program works. If people knew how the program worked, I believe that more people would use the myriad of features found in Word.
For those who are interested in learning some of those tricks, I have found a great resource posted by Charles Kenyon. The page includes a tutorial, downloads, helpful links, and a host of other aids.
The resources on this page are invaluable and I urge you to check them out.
Notwithstanding the confidentiality concerns found with Google Docs, I know that there are plenty of people who use and love Google Docs. Don’t get me wrong. I think it is a very neat application and I have used it before for personal, nonconfidential stuff.
Anyway, for those who use Google Docs, Dumb Little Man has a post that provides 10 Google Docs hacks. From the list, my favorites are the bulk uploader, as well as the bulk download options.
Although I don’t know that I would keep my finances on Google Docs, the tip describing how you can easily keep track of your finances is pretty neat.
Also, I didn’t know this, but you can easily create polls using Google Docs. Now that is a cool application.
Check out the post for all 10 tips.
One of the things I love about Acrobat 9 is the ease with which you can create forms. Adding form fields is quite easy and makes working with pre-printed court forms a piece of cake.
I was recently working on a form the other day, however, and realized that I wanted to create a field that automatically calculated the information based on the information provided in another field. I know that you can create calculated fields in Acrobat, but I don’t know how to create the calculation script for what I want. I was hoping that some Acrobat expert has a suggestion for me.
What I am looking for is a script that will do the following: Field 1 is a date. For field 2, I would like the field to automatically calculate the date 3 days before the date entered in Field 1.
Is this something that can be done? Does anyone know how to write this script?
Anyone familiar with my blog knows that I am a big proponent of storing every document in every file electronically. When I talk about this, one question that many people ask is what kind of scanner to get. One of the most popular scanners is the Fujitsu ScanSnap. This scanner is reasonably priced, works well, and is easy to operate. Three qualities that I am sure have helped its popularity.
Knowing the right hardware to use, however, is only part of the battle. You also have to know how to integrate that hardware into your workflow. Recently Rick Borstein posted a tutotial on how to best integrate a ScanSnap with Adobe Acrobat.
As with many of Rick’s posts, he takes you step-by-step (including handy pictures) through how to best set the scanner up to use it with Adobe Acrobat. If you are considering adding a ScanSnap to your desktop, you definately want to check out Rick’s post.
Recently I posted about an article I had published in Chicago Lawyer Magazine about using Adobe Acrobat as part of my legal research workflow. I have received a couple of questions relating to the article relating to which version of Acrobat you need and how to create an index so that the research is searchable.
With respect to the question of what version of Acrobat is needed, that depends largely on what you want to do with the research that you have. If what you are concerned with is reading your research and annotating it any of the paid versions of Adobe Acrobat will work fine. Please note that the free Adobe Reader will not work for this. You must have one of the paid versions. Alternatively, a program such as NitroPDF would work just fine for this as well. In fact, I find Nitro’s commenting and mark-up tools easy to use than Acrobat’s.
However, if you wish to make your research fully searchable by creating an index that spans multiple files or multiple folders, you will need either Acrobat Pro or Pro Extended. These allow you to create a very powerful index. Doing so is actually quite simple. Further, Rick Borstein has already done all of the work of demonstrating how to do this.
In a blog post from a couple of years ago, Rick explains how to create an index in Adobe Acrobat. Although the instructions provided are for Acrobat 8, they also appear to be the same to create an index in Acrobat 9.
Additionally, for those who learn best by watching, Rick has some how-to videos to talk about search options in Acrobat. In particular, he has one that talks about the differences between Find and Search and one that demonstrates how to build a full text index.
As you can see from Rick’s post and demo, creating an index is an easy thing to do. Further, it can certainly aid you when you want to search through your PDFs, whether they relate to legal research or not.