How to Use Adobe Acrobat: The Useful Features

PDF is the universal document format — contracts, invoices, reports, forms, presentations — anything that needs to look exactly the same regardless of who opens it. Adobe Acrobat is the definitive PDF tool: the software that created the format and still provides the most comprehensive set of creation, editing, and management capabilities. Most people who have it installed use only a fraction of what it can do. If you want the full context, see our Complete Guide to Software and Apps.

This guide covers editing text and images in PDFs, combining and splitting documents, creating and filling forms, signatures, protecting files, and the AI features that have recently transformed what’s possible in PDF workflows.

Editing text and images in PDFs

Direct PDF editing is the feature that most justifies a paid Acrobat subscription. Open any PDF → click “Edit PDF” in the right panel (or Tools → Edit PDF). The document enters edit mode: text appears in boxes, images appear with handles, and you can click any element to modify it.

Clicking a text block selects it for editing. The properties toolbar at the top lets you change font, size, colour, bold, italic, and alignment. To add new text: click any empty area in edit mode — a new text box appears. To delete text: select it and press Backspace.

Images in edit mode can be selected, moved, resized, rotated, deleted, and replaced. Right-click any image → “Replace image” to swap it with a new file. Crop and Flip options appear in the image toolbar — sufficient for most document editing needs without leaving Acrobat.

Important limitation: editing text in a scanned or image-based PDF requires OCR first. The document must be converted from an image scan to actual selectable text before editing is possible. Acrobat handles this automatically — see the OCR section below.

Combining, splitting, and organising PDFs

Combine multiple PDFs into one: Tools → Combine Files → drag and drop multiple files (PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, JPEG images — Acrobat converts non-PDF files automatically during the process) → reorder by dragging → click “Combine.” Acrobat Pro supports up to 2,000 files and 20 GB total in a single combine operation.

Split a PDF: Tools → Organize Pages → Split. Split by number of pages (every N pages), by file size (when the document reaches a specified MB), or by top-level bookmarks (at each chapter or section). Each section becomes a separate PDF. Useful for extracting chapters from a long document, separating a merged invoice batch into individual invoices, or distributing sections to different recipients.

Reorder, rotate, insert, delete pages: Tools → Organize Pages shows thumbnail previews of every page. Drag thumbnails to reorder. Click the rotate icons for 90° rotation. Click the trash icon to delete a page. Click “Insert” to add pages from another PDF. Holding Ctrl and clicking multiple thumbnails selects them for batch operations.

Reduce file size: File → “Reduce File Size” for basic compression, or File → Save as Other → “Optimized PDF” for granular control over image quality, font embedding, and metadata. Large PDFs from design software often run 10–20 MB; optimisation typically brings them under 1 MB — making documents shareable without clogging inboxes or exceeding attachment limits.

Forms, signatures, and document security

Creating fillable forms: Tools → Prepare Form → open any existing PDF or Word document. Acrobat automatically detects areas that look like form fields — dashed lines, blanks labelled “Name:” or “Date:” — and converts them to interactive fields. Add text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdown lists, and signature fields manually from the form editing toolbar. Double-click any field to set its name (critical for data export), whether it’s required, its format (number, date, phone), and hover tooltip text.

Electronic signatures: Tools → Request e-signatures → add recipients and specify who signs where → send. Recipients sign in their browser without needing Acrobat installed. The completed document is automatically returned to the sender with signatures embedded and a certificate of completion. For signing documents you receive: open the PDF → “Fill & Sign” → click signature fields and sign with a drawn, typed, or image signature.

Password protection: File → Protect Using Password → set an opening password (required to open the document) and/or a permissions password (restricts printing, editing, copying). Set encryption level to AES-256 for maximum security. For highly sensitive documents, combine password protection with restrictions on what recipients can do with the file.

Redaction: Tools → Redact → select text or areas to redact → Apply. Redaction permanently removes the selected content from the PDF — the text cannot be recovered by removing a black box, because the underlying data is deleted, not just covered. Critical for legal and compliance workflows where sensitive data (SSNs, financial details, personal information) must be permanently removed before sharing.

OCR, AI features, and advanced tools

OCR (Optical Character Recognition): converts image-based and scanned PDFs into searchable, editable text. Open a scanned PDF → Acrobat detects it is image-based → “Scan & OCR” → “Recognize Text.” After OCR, the document’s text is selectable, searchable, and editable. OCR quality depends on scan quality — clean, high-resolution scans produce near-perfect recognition; photocopied or handwritten documents produce lower accuracy.

Acrobat AI Assistant (2024+): a generative AI layer that enables natural language interaction with any PDF. Open a PDF → AI Assistant panel (right side) → ask questions about the document. “What are the three main conclusions of this report?” “Summarise the financial terms in this contract.” “What are the key dates and deadlines in this agreement?” The AI reads the document content and provides focused answers without you having to search manually through long documents. Useful for quickly extracting key information from lengthy contracts, reports, and research papers.

Export PDF to other formats: Tools → Export PDF → choose Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, RTF, or image formats. Acrobat’s export preserves formatting better than most alternatives, including tables, columns, headers, and embedded fonts. The Word export particularly is useful for converting a PDF back to an editable Word document when the original source file isn’t available.

Comments, review workflows, and document comparison

Commenting tools: open a PDF → “Comment” in the toolbar. Available tools: sticky notes (click anywhere to place a text note), highlights (drag over text — yellow, pink, or other colours), strikethrough and underline for text markup, insertion caret for suggesting additions, drawing tool for freehand annotation. Each comment includes the reviewer’s name and timestamp.

Review workflow: Tools → Send for Comments → enter recipients’ email addresses → add a deadline → send. Recipients view and comment in their browser without Acrobat installed. All comments appear centrally in the sender’s copy as reviewers add them — eliminating the problem of reconciling five separately-annotated PDFs into one master document.

Compare Documents: Tools → Compare Files → select two versions of a PDF → run. The comparison report highlights added text in green and deleted text in red, similar to Track Changes in Word but for PDFs. Works on both text PDFs and scanned documents (after OCR). Particularly valuable in legal and compliance contexts where understanding exactly what changed between two contract versions is critical.

Free vs paid — what you actually need

For casual users who only need to view, annotate, and sign documents: the free Reader covers everything. For knowledge workers who regularly edit PDFs, export to Word, or combine documents: Standard pays for itself in time saved. For legal, compliance, and forms-heavy workflows: Pro is the right tier — the form creation, redaction, and compare features aren’t available below it.

The free Acrobat web app at acrobat.adobe.com provides several tools online without a subscription (compression, conversion, basic editing) — worth checking before committing to a paid plan if your needs are occasional. Our guide on using Google Drive covers storing and sharing the PDFs created in Acrobat, while Adobe’s official documentation at Adobe’s Acrobat User Guide covers every feature in depth including accessibility, batch processing, and action wizards for power users.

Accessibility and accessibility checking

Accessibility in PDFs ensures documents can be read by screen readers used by people with visual impairments — a legal requirement in many jurisdictions for public-facing government documents, and increasingly an expectation for corporate communications.

Acrobat Pro includes an accessibility checker: Tools → Accessibility → Accessibility Check. The checker evaluates the document against PDF/UA and WCAG 2.1 standards, flagging issues like missing alt text on images, incorrect reading order, missing document language, and untagged PDFs. Each flagged issue includes guidance on how to fix it. See also How to Use Microsoft Teams for a related case.

Common accessibility fixes in Acrobat:

• Add alt text to images: right-click any image → Properties → “Alternate Text” tab → enter descriptive text
• Set document language: File → Properties → Advanced tab → Reading Options → Language → select the primary document language
• Tag the document: for PDFs created from untagged sources, Tools → Accessibility → Autotag Document adds structural tags that screen readers use to navigate
• Fix reading order: Tools → Accessibility → Reading Order → reorder content regions to match logical reading sequence if the automatic order is incorrect

Practical time-savers for frequent Adobe Acrobat users

• Action Wizard (Pro): create sequences of operations that run automatically on one or multiple files — apply OCR, flatten form fields, reduce file size, add a watermark, and save to a specific location, all in one click. Batch processing large numbers of PDFs becomes a one-button operation.
• Saved views and tool shortcuts: customise the right-side tools panel to show only the tools you use — drag frequently-used tools to the top and remove ones you never use. Reduces the time spent finding the right tool.
• Portfolio: a PDF Portfolio assembles multiple documents (PDFs, Word files, Excel spreadsheets, images) into a single navigable PDF file without merging them — each document remains independently accessible. Better than a combined PDF when recipients need to download or work with individual documents separately.
• Stamp tool: apply “Approved,” “Confidential,” “Draft,” or custom stamps to documents. Stamps appear as annotations rather than embedded in the document content, making them easily removable. Useful for internal document review workflows where status needs to be visible but not permanently embedded.

Adobe Acrobat rewards time spent learning it. Most users discover one or two features and stick with them indefinitely — often the equivalent of using a Swiss Army knife only as a bottle opener. The editing, combining, OCR, and AI features alone represent the kind of capability that previously required sending documents to specialised services or maintaining expensive enterprise software. For anyone whose work involves regular PDF handling, getting comfortable with the full toolset is one of the highest-return skill investments available. You might also run into How to Use Todoist.