The Organizer is a tool similar in some respects to Adobe Bridge. Although not all features within Adobe Bridge are available in Acrobat’s Organizer, it has many impressive tools and commands that help you manage and access documents from within Acrobat.

To open the Organizer, choose File >> Organizer >> Open Organizer, click the Organizer tool in the File toolbar, or press Shift+Ctrl+1. (On Windows you can also choose File >> History >> Open Organizer.) When you select any of the options, the Organizer, opens.

The Organizer window contains three panes, a number of tools, and menu commands that you select from context menus. When you first open the Organizer, you find three panes in the Organizer window divided by two separator bars. On the left side of the window is the Categories pane.

In the center, you find the Files pane and the right side holds the Pages pane. You can adjust the size of the panes by clicking a separator bar and dragging it to the left or right. As one pane is sized down, the adjacent pane is sized up. You can adjust the size of the Organizer window by dragging the lower-right corner of the window.

Using the Categories pane

The Categories pane in the Organizer contains three types of categories. At the top of the pane is History followed by My Computer (Windows) or Macintosh HD (Macintosh) and at the bottom you find Collections. The History category offers you the same choices for viewing history as you find in the File menu in Windows.

As you click one of the History options, the files listed in the Files pane reflect the history period you choose. The My Computer/Macintosh HD category shows you a view of your hard drive and all servers and drives connected to your computer, similar to a Windows Explorer view or a Macintosh Finder view.

You can select a folder, and all PDFs within that folder are listed in the Files pane regardless of whether they appear in the view history. Below your accessible hard drives and servers you find Favorite Places.

If you keep documents within folders you frequently access, right-click (Windows) or Ctrl+click (Macintosh) to open a context menu over Favorite Places or click the Add Favorite Place button at the bottom of the Categories pane.

The Browse For Folder dialog box opens (Windows) or the Select a folder to add to your favorite places dialog box opens on the Macintosh after clicking the Add to favorite place button. Adding Favorites in this fashion is similar to adding Favorites in your Web browser.

After you select a folder and click OK, the folder you selected appears at the bottom of the Favorite Places list. The Collections category works similarly to Favorite Places, except that instead of adding folders to a list, you can select individual files and add them to a collection.

You can add files to collections from different folders on your hard drive. By default, Acrobat offers you three collections—Collection 1, Collection 2, and Collection 3. You manage collections through the use of a context menu. Open a context menu from any collection name in the Collections category and the menu options appear.

The menu selections should be self-explanatory. Select Create a New Collection to add another collection to the list. Select Rename Collection to rename a collection. Select Delete Collection to remove the collection. Click Add Files to add documents to your collection.

After you add documents to a collection and click the collection name, all files added to the collection appear in the Files pane. After installing Acrobat you may want to rename the default collection names to more descriptive names used in your workflow.

Open a context menu on each collection name and select Rename Collection. The collection name is highlighted and ready for you to type a new name.

Using the Pages pane

One of the great features of the Organizer is that it shows multiple pages in the Pages pane for all files containing more than one page. When you select a multipage document, all pages are displayed in thumbnail view in the Pages pane before you open the file. At the bottom of the pane is a zoom slider.

Drag the slider left to display smaller thumbnails and to the right to make the thumbnail views larger. The minus and plus buttons display thumbnails smaller and larger, respectively, in zoom increments. As you view multipage documents in the Pages pane, you can double-click any page thumbnail to open the respective page in Acrobat.

Select a page thumbnail and open a context menu, and a single menu command appears enabling you to open that page. Another nice feature in the Pages pane is the display of a Document Status icon that appears when you save files that have a special status or special feature.

Such features might include a document saved with layers, a file in a commenting review, or a certified document. In addition to the Document Status icon, some files may display a security key representing files that have been password secured.

Bookmarking Web-hosted

Acrobat is well integrated with many different Web services and support. The Organizer is no exception when it comes to supporting Web-related services. You can add anything you can view in Acrobat as a PDF document to your Organizer.

When you add a document to a collection from a Web-hosted PDF, the link is made to where the file is hosted. In this particular case, it’s a link to a URL that you can create as easily as adding files from your hard drive to your collections.

The first step is to view a PDF document as an inline view in a Web browser. Both Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer are supported. When you view a PDF in a Web browser, many Acrobat tools appear below your browser’s tools. When you click the Organizer tool, the Add to Favorites dialog box opens.

Click a collection and click OK to add the link to your collection. When you return to Acrobat, you can view the URL link in the respective collection. Open the Organizer and click the collection name where you added the link. In the Files pane you see all documents added to the collection.

Those files added from Web URLs appear with a different icon than standard PDF documents and the content of the page is not shown for these links. You can add files from PDFs on your hard drive and view them from within a Web browser (something you might do when working with browser-based reviews), or from URL addresses on the Web.

In the Files pane adjacent to the document icon, you see the URL address from where the document was retrieved. Double-click any Web-linked file and your default Web browser opens, takes you to the URL, and loads the PDF in the browser window.