Acrobat 9: Changing Properties of Multiple Objects

I recently had a student in an Acrobat class pose an excellent question. She was a teacher. She had a PDF file of a student's work. Other students had posted comments on the file as critiques. The file's author was unknown to the critical participants, but each comment left on the file was easily identifiable by an author's name.

Once the comments were completely applied, she wanted to remove any unique author's name from the comments. She knew that she could change the author's name for each comment individually by right-clicking a comment, selecting Properties and changing the author's name on the General tab. Not hard, but her file had dozens of pages and more than 100 comments. She was stumped, and knew she didn't want to apply the changes one at a time.

My solution was to have her open the Comments panel. I had her select any of the comments in the Comments Panel. Next she pressed [Ctrl] [A] to select all of the comments.

By right-clicking the now selected comments and choosing Properties, the Properties dialog box represented (and controlled) the properties of the selected comments.

Finally, I had her type Anonymous into the author field of the General Tab. This step quickly changed the Author for all of the comments.

It's worth noting that with the comments all selected, one could universally change the icon, color and opacity of the selected comments.

Quick and easy. Without this trick, she would have spent hours adjusting comment properties individually. With this trick… done in a flash!

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