Last week I installed all the new software and upgrades I could in preparation for my German DevCon lockdown. One of the updates I needed to do was moving Acrobat from v7.0.0 to v7.0.5. So being the good user I finally give into the annoying reminder about upgrading when I returned from Southwest Fox.
Acrobat runs fine after the upgrade (which should not be a relief, but lately I have been a little gun shy about updates on any software) . Then this week I notice Acrobat has two shortcuts on the Windows Taskbar when I have two PDFs open – weird because it never did that before. I regularly have multiple PDFs open. So what the heck was the Adobe designers and developers thinking when they added this feature during the upgrade? Probably something like – we are sure all our customers will want to see a shortcut to each and every PDF they have open – so set the default preference on automatically.
No! Noooooo! Nooooooooooo!
You set the preference so the user has the same experience and you make this preference discoverable so the user can turn it on. This is a big deal. I spent quite a bit of time looking through the zillion pages of preference settings inside Acrobat and did not see it. Finally I wizened up and did a search on the Help file and low and behold, there it is on the General preferences. At least it was easy to find in the Help and the tech writers get kudos for doing a good job.
Unchecked the preference and once again all is good in Whoville. But what an aggravation. So if you are experiencing this frustration in Acrobat, on the menu, Edit | Preferences to bring up the Preferences dialog. In the Categories listbox, select General. The last checkbox in the Miscellaneous settings will toggle your preference.