New Acrobat experience

The simplified interface in Acrobat helps you quickly discover tools and complete your PDF task efficiently. The workspace is intuitive and fluid, providing a consistent experience across all surfaces, whether it’s desktop, web, or mobile. The Acrobat desktop application has the following three views: Home view, which is the application’s landing page, or the default page when no document is open in Acrobat. The All Tools View, which is a page that lists all the tools available in Acrobat, or a panel that pops out when a document is open. And the Document View. And this is the default view when a document is open in Acrobat. When you open multiple documents, each document opens as a separate tab in the application window. If your version of Acrobat doesn’t look like this, simply select View > Enable New Acrobat.

When you first open Acrobat, you’re greeted with the Home View, which gives you quick access to your recent files, shared files, frequently used tools, notifications, and storage accounts. When you’re in the Home View, you’ll see the Home icon is selected at the top. This is the default view if you don’t have a file open. The hamburger menu, which are the three horizontal lines on Windows only, includes options for the most common tasks that users perform. Combining what was previously known as the file edit and view menus, at the top is the Global toolbar, where you can also use the Create button for quick access to create, combine, or opening a file.

By default, when you’re in the Home view, the Recent files are selected automatically.

Here you’ll find a list of the files that you recently worked on. The files may be located locally on your system, on Adobe Cloud Storage or other third party storage apps like OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, SharePoint, or Google Drive. The icons next to the name indicate where the files came from. For example, the cloud indicates the files are located in Adobe Cloud Storage. The speech bubble indicates the file was a collection analyzed with the AI Assistant in Adobe Cloud Storage.

The sharing label indicates whether the file is shared or just local to you.

You can view your Recent files in list view or thumbnail view.

When you select any file from the Recent list. A right panel displays showing a thumbnail preview of all the pages in the file, and a list of frequently used tools. You can select any tool to perform the desired action on the file.

You can also star files for quick access across various devices. The starred files are copied to Adobe Cloud Storage, and you can see the starred file here in the center or on the left below Recent files. If you’d like to hide the starred files from your list of recent files, just go ahead and select the hamburger menu and then select Preferences. And in the General category you can de-select View Starred Files in Recent tab. Now that you’ve learned about the recent and starred files, let’s move along the left hand pane here under Adobe Cloud Storage, all your files that are stored on Adobe Cloud Storage can be accessed here. Selecting Your files, Scans, Shared by you, or Shared by others, further filters the files for quicker access.

Under Other file storage gives you access to your online accounts such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Microsoft SharePoint. You can also add additional accounts using the blue Add file storage link. Under Third-party apps, you can access files like meeting transcripts from Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Under agreements, you can view and manage the agreements that you have sent or received for electronic signature. Now up at the top, the question mark allows you to access Acrobat help and tutorials. The notification bell notifies you of any status change on the shared documents. It displays notifications about all the incoming and outgoing requests for documents shared for viewing, reviewing, and signing. You can see all your subscription apps under this icon. To edit or update your account, select the profile icon from the top right corner and then select Manage My Account. This will open your account page in your web browser, where you can view your subscribed plans or edit your profile.

Search allows you to use a keyword to find your files regardless of where they’re located. They can either be in cloud storage or local. When you select All tools, you get the All Tools view, and without a document open, you’ll see this tab highlighted here. Next to the Home View tab in the global toolbar. All the tools are listed in categories and you can search for any tool. For example, maybe you want to use the Split tool but can’t remember where it’s located under the Organize Pages tool. It will automatically locate the tool for you when you select any tool. It displays the tool specific menu in a left hand panel.

If you don’t have any document open, you can choose select a file or just drag and drop to open the file that you want to work on.

When you open a file with no tool selected, you’ll see the Document View. In this view, the file is displayed under a new tab and notice how the tab gives you a hint to where the file came from. In this case, Adobe Cloud Storage, the All Tools panel opens for easy access on the left, and you can change the tools that appear in the All Tools panel for your specific requirements just by dragging them to the order you want.

A floating widget will also appear in the document pane called the Quick Action Toolbar that you can move anywhere. You can customize the tools that display in the Quick Action toolbar by selecting the three dots at the bottom and then selecting the Gear icon.

The right rail is divided into top and bottom sections. From the top, you can choose to bookmark, view, or navigate pages. At the bottom, you can access zoom settings and viewing options. Now, the right side panel can also be customized either by right clicking on the panel or Control- Click on the Mac. Alternatively, you can customize the right side panel by going to the hamburger menu and selecting View > Show/Hide Side Panels. In addition, under the hamburger menu, you can also select your overall color theme. And finally, with the document open in the Document pane, you can right click or Control-click on the Mac to access the context menu to perform various commands as well. And that’s it, now you have a complete overview of the new Acrobat Workspace experience.