Adobe's PDF technology is extremely useful. However, navigating through some PDF files can become a little tedious. Enter the bookmark, a link which can be used to take the user to a specific page within the document, speeding up the process of navigating through the document.

When you distribute PDFs that contain important information about your products or services, you want to make sure that your audience can get to key facts as quickly as possible. Adding bookmarks to your PDF files can make them more useful and attractive to potential clients.

The bookmarks panel is standard feature of all versions of Acrobat including the free reader. To make it visible, the user clicks on the View menu, then on Navigation Panels then on Bookmarks. To use a bookmark, the user just clicks on it and is taken to the page with which the bookmark has been associated.

If the PDF that you are distributing to your audience is one that you want them to spend some time reading and digesting, adding bookmarks will improve the chances of this happening. However, bookmarks cannot be created with Acrobat Reader: you will need either Acrobat Professional or Acrobat Standard, the commercial versions of Acrobat. But then you will also need one of these two bits of software to create your PDF in the first place.

Once you have created the PDF, open it with Acrobat Standard or Professional and open the Bookmarks panel. Next, navigate to the first page that you want your audience to be able to find easily, choose New Bookmark from the Options menu in the top right of the Bookmarks panel and enter a name for the bookmark. Repeat this procedure to create as many bookmarks as you think useful.

You're probably thinking that this all sounds a bit tedious. The good news is that there are a few ways of accelerating the process. The first technique involves using the selection tool which you will find next to the Hand tool on the Acrobat toolbar. Once you have scrolled to the page you want linked, highlight some text on the page which could act as the name of the bookmark. When you create your bookmark, this text will automatically become the name of the bookmark. (Also, to create the bookmark, try using Control-B.)

It is also possible to use software which will create bookmarks automatically like AutoBookmark. This utility scans a document and examines its structure recognising headings by the font sizes, alignment and indentation levels. It then automatically generates a hierarchy of bookmarks to pages where headings are found.

Adobe themselves also produce a macro utility called PDFMaker which gets added to any installed Microsoft Office program whenever you load Acrobat Standard or Professional onto a machine. The utility is accessed via a menu and an office toolbar.

Let's look at what PDFMaker does in the three most widely-used programs of the Microsoft Office suite. Firstly, in Word, it generates bookmarks out of any index entries, table of contents items and stylesheet-formatted text. Secondly, in PowerPoint, it creates bookmarks which take you to each of your slides and, thirdly, in Excel, bookmarks are generated that are linked to each of the worksheets of the original Excel workbook.

Then there are three page layout programs which have similar features: QuarkXPress, InDesign and Serif PagePlus. Firstly, these are examples of programs which produce PDFs without the need of a full version of Acrobat. Secondly, like Word, they will all generate PDFs containing bookmarks based on indexes, styles and tables of content.

It is also worth mentioning that bookmarks can do more than just link to a particular page within the PDF document. Firstly, by default, they actually link to a view rather than a page. Thus, for example, if a page in your document contains a map, you can zoom in on the map till it fills the screen and then create a bookmark. When your users click this bookmark, they will be taken to the exact zoom level that was current when the bookmark was created.

And what about all the other stuff you can get bookmarks to do? Well, the first thing will be to remove the default action. Right-click the bookmark and then activate the Actions tab. Next, select the "Go to a page in this document" action that was created by default and click on the Delete button. Select a different action from the drop-down at the top of the screen and then click Add.

Wouldn't it be a total waste of time if you spend a couple of hours creating tons of useful bookmarks only for your audience to completely ignore them either because they don't know what bookmarks are or because their Bookmarks panel is closed and it never occurs to them to open it.

So, they created a nice setting which allows you to specify which panels are open when the user first opens the file. To access this feature, just choose File - Properties then click on the tab marked Initial View. Set the Navigation Panels drop-down to "Bookmarks Panel and Page". That way the Bookmarks will be opened whenever your document loads.