Why Learn Adobe Acrobat?

Adobe Acrobat is a software application that lets users read, edit, and manipulate PDF files. It is one of the most commonly used professional software applications worldwide. Have you ever explored all of the things Adobe Acrobat can do? Not only is Adobe used across a large swath of professional industries, but it is also a handy skill for anyone who is collecting, organizing, or preserving essential documents to learn. Plus, learning Adobe Acrobat can help make students more comfortable with the Adobe Creative Cloud. Here, you’ll learn more about the careers that benefit from Adobe Acrobat and how it can enhance your professional life. Regardless of your overall goals, learning Adobe Acrobat is a valuable and impressive skill to add to your resume. 

What is Adobe Acrobat?

Adobe Acrobat is the most commonly used application for reading, displaying, and editing documents in Adobe’s portable document format (PDF). The PDF file extension is designed as a universal text and image display system that can display on any machine, regardless of what applications, hardware, or operating system you are using. Adding the extension makes Adobe Acrobat a vital tool for cross-platform collaboration and design processes. It is also essential for securely authorizing, signing, and archiving important documents, including transcripts, tax filings, and other legal documents. 

Adobe is also constantly striving to ensure that Acrobat is more than just a PDF reader. While there is a freeware version of the application to let any user read documents, Acrobat Pro lets users edit, manipulate, and otherwise prepare PDF documents for distribution. Importantly, it also allows users to convert PDFs to word documents, excel spreadsheets, or even jpegs, which is an integral part of optimizing specific professional processes. Between these features and essential quality-of-life benefits, such as combining documents into a single PDF, compressing PDFs, and automated features ensuring documents meet specific critical legal regulations, Adobe Acrobat is one of the most versatile and vital baseline tools available.

Read more about what Adobe Acrobat is and why you should learn it. 

What Can You Do with Adobe Acrobat?

Adobe Acrobat is a versatile software program that lets users create and share PDF files that can be read and edited on almost any device. The program is important for both collaborative design work and for documenting and archiving important documents. Using Adobe Acrobat makes remote work more accessible and efficient since Acrobat includes authentication and documentation features that allow users to encrypt, protect, sign, and notarize documents without meeting with a signee in-person. These built-in collaboration features can improve both workflow efficiency and the kinds of work that is practical for a given company or organization.

Adobe Acrobat is also one of the most commonly used tools for archiving and preserving important documents. PDF readers can produce high-quality scans of physical documents and display them on almost any modern device. This ability makes Adobe Acrobat a valuable tool for making rare or sensitive documents more accessible to the public. It also ensures that individuals can easily create and access backup versions of physical documents they want to keep protected. Since Acrobat also has significant privacy and security features, learning Acrobat is an excellent way to ensure that these documents are appropriately protected when you need others to access them.

Common Professional Uses for Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat is used across many industries because it is versatile in its functions. Any professionals who want to share and collaborate on documents will want to learn how to use Acrobat. In addition, Acrobat is frequently used to store and share copies of essential documents, create digital versions of sensitive or one-of-a-kind documents, or allow for improved online workflow by letting employees sign and notarize documents through email exchanges. While Adobe Acrobat skills won’t be enough to find a new career, they will provide students with valuable tools to help them succeed.

Some of the most common professional Acrobat users are business professionals who need to archive, collect, store, and transfer important files and documents. Acrobat offers robust tools for displaying documents on any device. PDF files are the most commonly used files for scanned documents, an essential method of creating replicable and transferable copies of physical documents. Making sure that reports are easily accessible and recorded is much easier working with Adobe Acrobat than with a tool like Word.

Acrobat is also essential to any administrative position, as it automates many routine documentation tasks. Any position that regularly requires employees to create, fill out, collect, or organize administrative records will almost certainly require knowledge of Adobe Acrobat since it makes the kind of data administration that undergird large firms possible. Jobs in health are perfect examples of those who need Adobe Acrobat for day-to-day functions. Medical administrators, for example, working at hospitals, must keep detailed records of thousands of forms that hundreds of different stakeholders fill out daily. Without Acrobat, the data entry alone from paper forms would be overwhelming. Thus, hospital administrative staff ideally has tools like Acrobat to make this part of their employment possible.

Acrobat is also helpful for anyone who needs to scan and create multiple copies of documents, images, files, or other non-digital information. For example, librarians may be tasked with digitizing holdings to make archives more accessible and less prone to deterioration. Lawyers and other employees within the justice system may quickly make copies of sensitive documents or transfer important information that is impossible to view in a word document or a jpeg image. Hiring managers must create PDFs of job materials for hundreds of applications to make this information accessible to search and digest. These are just a few of the myriad ways that Adobe Acrobat can help streamline workflow in unexpected places.

Collecting and Organizing Documents

One of the reasons that Acrobat has become so popular in the fields of data science and business is that it allows users to easily collect and display important documents in a wide variety of forms. Bringing all of these documents together into a single, universal file format makes storage and organization a breeze, which can improve your productivity and workflow if you work in a field that regularly requires large amounts of documents and forms to be compiled and recorded. 

Adobe Acrobat’s paid tiers also make it much easier to create standardized documents that are fillable from almost any device. Making document filling accessible and simple streamlines customer intake processes and improves administrative workflow.

Preserving and Protecting Documents

Adobe Acrobat is also one of the essential tools available to preserve and protect critical and sensitive documents. Since almost all scanned files are saved as PDFs, anyone who wants to make copies of physical documents for storage and preservation will want to learn how to use Acrobat. Whether this is as simple as making copies of medical and legal records or as elaborate as creating digital scans of treasured family photographs, learning how to use Acrobat will help individuals better preserve their information.

Adobe is also crucial for protecting these kinds of documents. It allows for safe storage and increased privacy. Acrobat’s innovative cloud storage system easily removes multiple redundant backups of stored documents. In addition, Adobe lets you password-protect your documents, limit who can access them, and even redact information to keep certain information safe.

Adobe Creative Cloud Skills

As a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, many users who license Adobe Acrobat will also receive access to other Adobe programs. Learning Acrobat first is a surefire way to ease into learning the other programs since they have overlapping design features and functionalities. While most of the other programs are more creatively oriented, learning how to edit PDFs will help improve workflow immeasurably for students learning and using other Creative Cloud applications.

How to Start Learning Adobe Acrobat

Individuals wanting to learn Adobe Acrobat will have a few options available. Since it is a reasonably ubiquitous program, some courses will teach enrolled students basic Acrobat skills to prepare them for everyday application use. Other courses will provide the same students with more in-depth knowledge of advanced Acrobat skills, often taught alongside other commonly used Adobe professional programs. No matter how you want to learn the skill, there is an Adobe Acrobat class that suits your needs.

Potential students often find that they learn best in a live instruction environment since live instructors can assist students in overcoming challenges in their learning and guide them through Acrobat’s features. Personalized learning benefits gaining software skills like Adobe Acrobat since students wishing to learn this application likely want to do so quickly. Learning with a live instructor can help ensure that students don’t get stuck on an issue and linger too long on any given aspect of their learning. Prospective class members can enroll in live Adobe Acrobat training courses in-person or online.

Prospective students interested in learning Acrobat at their own pace or who don’t want to wait for a training seminar to become available may wish to enroll in an on-demand Acrobat course. These self-paced classes give trainees a collection of course material, often pre-recorded video lectures, and allow them to review and practice those materials when it is most convenient for them. The individualized pacing makes these classes ideal for students who want to spread their Acrobat training over a few days when it is most convenient. These courses are also a helpful way to accelerate your Acrobat training since students can purchase an on-demand course and avoid waiting for a live training seminar to be scheduled in a student’s window of availability.

Similarly, students who want to gain basic Adobe Acrobat skills quickly may want to take advantage of free training resources. Acrobat is an accessible enough program for trainees who want to learn basic but essential functions with little assistance. While more complex tasks, particularly those undertaken by professional designers or office professionals, require more training, students can learn basic PDF functions quickly. Students interested in these training options may explore the videos available on Noble Desktop’s Creative Cloud playlist on their official YouTube channel or Noble’s Learn Acrobat hub, a carefully curated collection of free tutorials, articles, and resources.

Read the complete guide on how to learn Adobe Acrobat.

Learn Adobe Acrobat with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Individuals hoping to learn Adobe Acrobat will have a few options available. Noble Desktop offers private and group Adobe Acrobat training in-person at Noble’s Manhattan campus and online in live digital classrooms. These courses allow students to learn advanced Acrobat skills with the assistance of live instructors. Enrollees will work with hands-on examples that mirror the kinds of real-world applications for which they will employ Acrobat, and can ask questions and receive direct feedback from their instructors. Enrollees attending these courses will benefit from small class sizes, even online. Anyone who takes a course through Noble can retake that course within a calendar year, giving individuals s even more opportunities to master Adobe Acrobat.

Those wanting to learn Adobe Acrobat can enroll in Noble’s Adobe Acrobat Training course. This course is beginner-friendly and designed to get students comfortable with the key functionalities of Acrobat that they require in their day-to-day lives. This course will get new students up to speed by teaching them how to edit, merge, combine, arrange, share, and protect PDF files using Acrobat. This class is a great way to learn the ins and outs of Adobe Acrobat quickly. In this course, students will learn everything they need to know about storing, annotating, and working with PDF files. 

Another advantage to learning Adobe Acrobat is that it is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of tools and is therefore both heavily integrated with those applications and is one of the best ways to display designs on any device. Creative professionals, in particular, will want to learn Adobe Acrobat as part of their training in other Adobe Creative programs. Students learning skills like Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign will want to ensure they know how to improve their workflow efficiency using Acrobat.

Key Insights

• Adobe Acrobat is a versatile PDF reading application that stands as one of the world's most commonly used professional software.
• Any job that collects, organizes, records, or preserves documents in any way is very likely to use Adobe Acrobat to improve workflow efficiency.
• Learning Adobe Acrobat will improve your ability to document, organize, preserve, and protect your documents.
• Since Acrobat is connected to the Creative Cloud, learning the program is also helpful for anyone hoping to learn programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign.
• No matter why you want to learn Acrobat, Noble Desktop can help by providing expert Acrobat instruction courses. These courses are offered both in-person and online.