by David R. Mankin
The computer is part of just about every business work day. It's interesting to consider how the computer has given new meaning to common things. Let's take the mouse and the clipboard as two examples. In the old days, it wasn't such a nice thing to have a mouse on your desk, let along touch one. A clipboard was something a supervisor carried around when he checked up on you (or something a drill instructor shook in your face if you were in boot camp).
Today, the mouse is the most common way for you to communicate with your comptuer with clicks, drags, right-clicks and double-clicks. And you use the clipboard to copy and paste blocks of text and images frequently. However, it's important to understand that when you copy and paste, you copy to your operating system's clipboard, and you paste from it as well. Knowing this won't change the way you do this every day routine, but it will allow you to utilize your clipboard's data in a new and useful way.
In Acrobat, clicking the Create button reveals numerous ways to create a new PDF file. Familiar options are to create a PDF from a file, from a scanner or from a Web Page. The fourth option, PDF from Clipboard, is often overlooked. Now that I've reminded you what the clipboard is, you can divert the clipboard's contents directly into a new PDF file using the PDF from Clipboard command.
Acrobat is a very clever application and it knows what type of information is held in your clipboard. Copy an image, or part of an image, click the PDF from Clipboard command and you will end up with an image-based PDF file. Select and copy a block of text from a browser window or a text-based document, and Acrobat will build a text-based PDF file for you containing that block of text.
Adobe has even given you another way to use the clipboard's content: Document > Insert Pages > From Clipboard. Like that one? Good. It's time to feed your mouse some cheese and sign up for one of my Acrobat classes. There are tons of neat and useful commands and capabilities hidden in Acrobat. After two quick days of Acrobat training, your personal clipboard will be bursting with useful information.
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About the author: David R. Mankin is a Certified Technical Trainer, desktop publisher, computer graphic artist, and Web page developer. And if that wasn't enough, of course David is an Adobe-certified expert in Adobe Acrobat.