Tracking a review in Acrobat

Initiating and tracking multiple reviews, participating in others, and trying to keep it all straight isn’t simple. Fortunately, Adobe® Acrobat® 8 offers the Tracker to help you keep tabs on the process.

Requirements

To complete this article, you will need the following software:

Adobe Acrobat 8

• Try
• Buy (Professional)
• Buy (Standard)

Prerequisite knowledge:

Basic knowledge of commenting in Acrobat

Tracking a review

To track a review in Acrobat 8:

1. In Adobe Reader 8, choose View > Review Tracker. In Acrobat Professional 8, choose Review Tracker from the Review & Comment task button pop-up menu, or choose Comments > Review Tracker. All your current reviews—those you have initiated and others you are participating in—along with active Review Servers are listed in the left column of the window.
2. Click the (+) at the left of the My Reviews name to open the list of reviews and display the contents (Figure 1).

    

   

   Figure 1: Use the Review Tracker to keep up with your ongoing reviews.

3. In the Tracker you can do the following:
   • Click a review’s link in the right pane to open the document in either Acrobat 8 or Adobe Reader 8, depending on which program you are working in.
   • Click the Delete icon next to the listed review to delete it from your Review Tracker—the actual document isn’t affected.
   • Click the name of a review document in the list to display information about it in the right pane of the window (Figure 2).

      

     

     Figure 2: Manage the operation of your reviews from the dialog.

Controlling your review

If you are the owner, or initiator of the review, you see the names of those involved in the review listed. You can send e-mail to the recipients or add participants by clicking the respective links on the Review Tracker dialog.

Checking for comments

If you are using one or more shared reviews, specify some preferences to keep track of the process. Choose Edit > Preferences (Acrobat > Preferences), and choose Reviewing from the category list at the left of the Preferences dialog. Specify Shared Review settings:

• Check for new comments at a specified time frame for when the document is open, or in the background.
• Show Review Tracker alerts, which display in the task bar on the desktop. Messages about comments are displayed at specified time intervals.

Choose any of the time intervals by dragging the sliders. The values can vary from two minutes to a month. Click OK to close the Preferences dialog.

Where to go from here

For more information about commenting in Acrobat 8, check out these other great tutorials:

• Exporting comments to a Word document (Windows) from Acrobat 8 , by Donna Baker
• Working with the Comments List in Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker
• Organizing comments in Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker

About the authors