Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

Close Word Comments Easily

If you don't like how precisely you must mouse in Microsoft Word 2008 to delete comment balloons, note that you can Control-click (right-click) a balloon to pop up a contextual menu. From the menu choose Delete Comment, and you're done.

Also, to get rid of all comments at once, choose Tools > Customize Keyboard and set up a keyboard shortcut to go with the DeleteAllComments command, available in the Tools category. Oddly, there's no Delete Comment keyboard customization option that I can find.

 

 

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"Take Control of PDFpen 5" Teaches You to Tweak PDFs Like a Pro

Have you ever had to fill out and sign a PDF-based form? Or change the date on a PDF-based flyer? Make comments on a document sent around your workplace as a PDF file? Scan a document to PDF and OCR the text? For those tasks, I generally turn to Smile's PDFpen, which can perform many PDF manipulations more easily than Adobe Acrobat, and at a fraction of the price. That's why we're happy to bring you "Take Control of PDFpen 5" to demystify the many sorts of PDF manipulation you can accomplish using PDFpen. Written by Michael E. Cohen, whose electronic publishing credentials predate even PDF (he helped create Voyager's Expanded Books in the early 1990s), the 132-page ebook explains precisely what you can do with PDFs using PDFpen and its big brother, PDFpenPro. The book costs $10.

After a whirlwind history and overview of the PDF format, Michael walks you through PDFpen's tools and navigation. With those basics taken care of, you'll then learn how to:

  • Scan a document to PDF and make the text editable with OCR
  • Combine pages from multiple files into a single PDF
  • Turn a Web site into a multi-page PDF
  • Add or remove pages from a PDF
  • Add a handwritten signature to a PDF
  • Add page and Web links to a PDF
  • Make a clickable table of contents for a PDF
  • Mark up a PDF with professional editing marks
  • Edit text within a PDF that you received in email
  • Leave comments on a PDF document
  • Remove sensitive or confidential text from a PDF
  • Enhance the images in a PDF
  • Fill out a PDF-based form
  • Print just form entries on a pre-printed form
  • Create an interactive PDF-based form that can collect data and send it to you via email or the Web

An appendix describes the many useful AppleScripts that ship with PDFpen.

This ebook was created in collaboration with Smile, with Michael providing feedback during the PDFpen 5 development process and PDFpen's developers tech editing the book for complete accuracy.

 

Pear Note 2: More complete, understandable notes on your Mac.
Typed notes are blended with recorded audio, video, and slides
to create notes that make more sense when you need them most.
Learn more at <http://www.usefulfruit.com/tb>!
 

Comments about "Take Control of PDFpen 5" Teaches You to Tweak PDFs Like a Pro

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Th Donaghey2010-09-23 08:45
I get a good discount on Adobe Acrobat Pro. I bought an early edition of PDFpen after a glowing review of the program, only to find Acrobat just as capable and less buggy. I'm interested in workflow, though, so I need to know whether PDFpen deserves a place on my computer. I believe that any review of third-party software for wannabe PDF pros needs to address the pros and cons of the software with respect to the actual professional application, but I can't figure out from the preview whether you do an adequate job of comparing PDFpen to Acrobat. Is it easier to use? What does it do better? What capabilities does it lack? I'd be far more willing to pay $10 for a document that tells me a priori which software I need (and what I can do with it) than one that give me gee-whizzery about a program that ultimately doesn't do what I need it to do; then I've wasted $10 plus the cost of the cheaper software.
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Tonya Engst2010-09-23 08:55
Hi. The ebook announced in this article, assumes you've already gone through the comparison process that you describe and purchased the PDFpen software. I'm sorry to hear that you were disappointed with an older version of PDFpen. Smile has posted some information about how PDFpen compares to Acrobat on their site, and I'd be happy to help you get in touch with them if you want to follow up in person.

http://smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/compare.html
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