When we run Adobe Acrobat training courses in London, one of the first topics we tackle is bookmarks. Almost everyone will agree that PDFs are a great invention but it can sometimes be rather tedious to navigate through them. That’s where bookmarks become useful: they are clickable headings which take you to a specific part of the PDF document and allow you to get around a lot faster than scrolling or paging.

When you distribute PDFs containing key information about your services or products, you want to make sure that your readers can find important facts as quickly as possible. Including bookmarks in your PDF files can make them more attractive and useful to potential customers.

The bookmarks panel is one of the navigation panels normally displayed on the left of the Acrobat Reader screen. To show bookmarks, click on the bookmark icon or choose View – Navigation Panels – Bookmarks. Click on a bookmark to move to the page that it links to.

Bookmarks cannot be created with Acrobat Reader: you will need either Acrobat Professional or Acrobat Standard, the commercial versions of Acrobat. But then you will also need one of these two bits of software to create your PDF in the first place.

To create bookmarks, open the PDF with Acrobat Standard or Professional and make the Bookmarks panel visible. Next, move to the first page that you want to link to, choose New Bookmark from the Options menu in the top right of the Bookmarks panel then enter a name for the bookmark. Repeat this same procedure to create all your bookmarks.

If this all sounds like hard work, let’s look at a few ways of speeding things up. Firstly, as an alternative to typing a name for a bookmark, you can use the selection tool (located next to the hand tool on the toolbar) to select some text on the page then, when you choose New Bookmark, the selected text will be used as the bookmark name. Also, you can use the keyboard shortcut for New Bookmark which is Control-B.

Some programs can also generate bookmarks automatically. One example is Adobe PDFMaker, a utility for Microsoft Office 97, 2002 and 2003. This is automatically installed along with Acrobat Standard or Professional and creates a new menu in Office programs called “Adobe PDF” and also an “Adobe PDFMaker” toolbar.

When you use the PDFMaker utility to create a PDF, any text formatted with a Word heading style, such as “Heading 1″, “Heading 2″, etc., will be automatically converted to Acrobat bookmarks. The same applies to tables of content and index entries. Similarly, if you use PDFMaker to convert an Excel workbook to PDF, bookmarks to each worksheet will automatically be generated. Even in PowerPoint, a bookmark to each slide in your presentation will be created for you.

The major DTP packages will also automatically create PDF bookmarks based on styles, indexes and tables of content), in much the same way as Word. This applies to QuarkXPress, InDesign and Serif PagePlus. If you own one of these three software applications, you don’t actually need to have a copy of Acrobat to create your PDF files, since this capability is built-in to each of these brilliant programs.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that bookmarks only be used to link to a particular page within the PDF document. (They can do tons of other things as well.) In any case, they actually link to a view not a page. Thus, for example, if a page in your PDF file contains a map, you can zoom in on the map till it fills the screen and create a bookmark of that view. When your user clicks the bookmark, he or she will be taken to the zoom level that was current when you created the bookmark.