play presentation in adobe reader

How to make an interactive PDF.

Create interactive PDFs that are easy to use.

Wondering how to create an interactive PDF and not sure where to begin? Create engaging and interactive PDFs easily with the tips in this post.

PDFs are used every day for every kind of business you can imagine. Despite being used so often, creators don’t always make interactive PDFs due to the extra work. Although non-interactive PDFs are still informative, interactive PDFs are worth the effort because they help readers retain more information. Learning how to create engaging, meaningful PDFs can give your readers an informative experience that they won’t forget.

Steps for how to create interactive PDFs.

When creating an interactive PDF, you’ll need to have access to a program that allows you to create interactive elements. Adobe Acrobat is one such program that is commonly used for this purpose. To create an interactive PDF, you’ll need to follow these steps:

• Open your PDF (or create a new one) in Acrobat or a similar tool.
• To add buttons: Edit PDF > Link > Add/Edit Web or Document Link > Menu Button.
• To add links: Edit PDF > Link > Add/Edit Web or Document Link.
• To add a video: Tools > Rich Media > Add Video > Insert Video.
• To add checkboxes: Tools > Prepare Form > Checkbox.
• Add other form fields like signatures by selecting: Tools > Prepare Form.

When you’re ready, preview the final version by choosing Tools > Print Production > Output Preview. Test each element to make sure it works as you intended. Take a few moments to make any last-minute changes before continuing.

How to export your interactive PDF file.

After you’ve created your interactive PDF, you’ll need to export it so that others can view it. To do this, follow these simple steps:

• Go to the File menu and select Export.
• Choose the format you’d like to export to (such as PDF or HTML).
• Follow the prompts to save your file.

What does an interactive PDF mean?

Interactive PDFs are documents that have elements your readers can engage with. These include buttons, links, videos, and more. They’re perfect for presentations or organizing different types of content in a single document. That makes the format a popular choice for teachers and instructional designers.

Why should you create an interactive PDF?

There are many benefits to learning how to create an interactive PDF . For one, it can help engage clients or stakeholders by providing them with a professional document. Additionally, learning how to create an interactive PDF allows you to organize your information better, providing a more logical and structured approach to presenting your content. For example, if you’re conducting a business meeting, an interactive PDF can help you provide a clear and concise overview of your presentation.

What are the benefits of creating an interactive PDF?

The benefits of learning how to make an interactive PDF depend on the purpose of the document. For marketing purposes, an interactive PDF can help you increase engagement with your audience by providing interactive elements, such as links to your website or tutorial videos that encourage viewers to learn more about your products or services.

For sales purposes, an interactive PDF can help you provide a more detailed and personalized approach through links to sign up for emailing lists and contact information like phone numbers and emails for your business.

For educational purposes, an interactive PDF can help you provide students with a more immersive learning experience through lecture videos and engaging charts and visuals.

Finally, for design purposes, an interactive PDF can help you showcase your design skills and provide your clients with a more visually appealing and compelling document.

Interactive PDF example: how elements can be used.

When learning how to make an interactive PDF, there are many elements that you can use to enhance the user experience, such as:

• Links. These can be used to direct readers to additional resources, such as web pages or documents.
• Buttons. These can be used to perform specific actions, such as showing or hiding text or images.
• Videos. These can be used to provide additional information or demonstrate a process.

For instance, if you’re creating an interactive recipe book, you can include a video that demonstrates how to prepare a certain dish. These elements can make your PDF more engaging and digestible for your audience.

More resources to work with your PDFs.

After learning to create interactive PDFs that more effectively engage your audience, it can be helpful to learn more about PDF documents to continue leveling up your PDF expertise. Here are some additional resources about working with PDFs:

• Did you know you can create PDF bookmarks? Learn how to add bookmarks to PDF files .
• Need to change your default PDF viewer? Learn how to change your default viewer.
• Unable to add links to a PDF? Learn how to easily add a hyperlink to PDF files.
• Need to add numbers to your PDFs, too? Learn how to add Bates Numbering to your PDFs.

• Ask the community
• Adobe support
• Acrobat DC FAQ
• Contact Adobe support
• Actions exchange
• Tool Set exchange
• Acrobat forum
• Acrobat blog
• Reader forum
• Document Cloud forum
• Find an Adobe Certified Expert

This tutorial shows you how to work with the Combine Files features in Acrobat 9 . See what the all-new Acrobat DC can do for you.

Download a free trial of the new Acrobat.

Presenting: Adobe Presenter

Learn how you can use adobe presenter to create multimedia presentations and e-learning content..

By Donna Baker – June 30, 2008

By now, I’m sure everyone has seen PDF presentations created from PowerPoint—with good reason. PowerPoint produces compelling, visually attractive content that is simple to convert to PDF, including features like animation and transitions. Acrobat 9 Professional (Windows) elevates the PowerPoint-to-PDF creative process to a new plane with the introduction of Adobe Presenter, a simple way to create multimedia presentations and e-learning content.

Note: Adobe Presenter is available for Windows, and is compatible with Microsoft Office XP, 2003 and 2007.

What is Presenter, and why do I need it?

Suppose you could use PowerPoint as the basis for creating a sequence of presentations, learning materials, surveys and even standards-compliant quizzes. Further, suppose you could attach audio narration synchronized to your presentation and other types of multimedia, such as video. Finally, suppose you could publish the whole works as a Flash SWF, export it as a multimedia PDF file to view in Acrobat or Adobe Reader, or use it online via Acrobat Connect Pro (Figure 1). Would it be worth investigating? I think so.

Figure 1: Use Presenter to combine many features within a SWF wrapper

Note: Check out the PDF file produced for this article’s example, which includes attachments, an embedded FLV movie and a quiz.

Download PDF file [1.32 Mb]

Adobe Presenter is too feature-rich for more than an overview in this article; you’re sure to find lots of information online in the upcoming weeks and months. To help get you up to speed, I’m focusing on a basic workflow for building, storing and delivering a presentation. I’ll also point out a variety of features you can access for specialized functions and further exploration.

Presenter is integrated as a menu in PowerPoint as part of the Acrobat 9 Professional installation process. Like PDFMaker in PowerPoint, Presenter displays its own menu. Unlike a PDFMaker, however, Presenter doesn’t include a toolbar, and its menu is extensive (Figure 2). Interestingly, the learning curve for Presenter isn’t especially steep, primarily as it is introduced within the context of PowerPoint.

Figure 2: Presenter offers an extensive menu of options

Tip: Use the Office features to create a custom toolbar for Presenter. When you pull commands from the Presenter menu for your custom toolbar, the items appear to be removed from the menu. Not to worry—close and reopen PowerPoint to restore the menu.

Time-saving preferences

In PowerPoint, choose Adobe Presenter > Preferences to open a three-tab dialog where you can:

Add or edit/delete presenter information, including contact info and a logo

Specify an Adobe Connect Pro server

Define an audio input source—either a microphone or line in—and specify a prompt to test sound levels before recording

Basic Presenter workflow

Like any project, planning is key. Once you have defined how you intend to use the presentation, assemble materials and plan the content.

1. Create the presentation

Whether you start from an existing PowerPoint presentation or design from scratch, use the Presenter features to produce high-impact content. With the exception of quiz slides, Presenter content is added to existing slides. Quiz and scoring slides are added for you, using your Master slide layouts (Figure 3). You don’t configure the basic slide content and appearance, such as the background, color scheme, text and images using Presenter.

Figure 3: Presenter content added to PowerPoint slides

2. Add Presenter features to the slides

Choose items from the Adobe Presenter menu to enhance the presentation. For example, choose Adobe Presenter > Insert Video to open a dialog where you locate and select a video that is inserted on the slide and converted to Flash video (FLV) format.

Depending on your needs and presentation design, you can record audio or video using commands on the Adobe Presenter menu. To insert audio, for example, choose Adobe Presenter > Record Audio to open the dialog shown in Figure 4. You can record audio for any or all slides from this simple controller.

Figure 4: Record audio for one or all slides in your presentation

Quizzes are surprisingly easy to configure in Presenter. Not only can you build a quiz from scratch, you can also import existing quiz materials, and configure the quiz to your requirements. Follow these steps:

• Choose Adobe Presenter > Quiz Manager to open a dialog that lets you specify features for the overall quiz, such as reporting mechanisms, appearance, buttons, text and so on.
• Click Add Question to open the Question Types dialog and select a type, ranging from Multiple Choice to Likert. Click OK to open a New [ type ] question dialog, shown at the upper left of Figure 5. Add the question, responses, scoring and so on. Click OK to add the question to the quiz.
• Continue adding questions as required, and click OK to close the Quiz Manager. On the slide, you’ll see the question, responses, buttons and popups stacked on the slide (right center of Figure 5). When testing the file, however, the quiz displays appropriately (lower left image in Figure 5).

Figure 5: Configure and insert quiz questions into a presentation

Presenter and Learning Management Systems (LMS)

A presentation built in Presenter integrates readily with Connect Pro Server LMS, and generates the files for use with other Learning Management Systems. See the Presenter Help files for particulars on building SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) manifest files for integration with a third-party LMS. The XML manifest file includes data such as an identifier and title that complies with international standards for web-based training, issued by AICC (Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee).

3. Configure the interface

In addition to content added to the slides, Presenter offers configuration and control features for the SWF interface. The design of the interface is based on themes, which allow you to customize features such as presenter information, color schemes, panes, sidebar and so on. Choose Adobe Presenter > Presentation Settings to open a four-tab dialog (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Specify characteristics for the presentation appearance and playback

Appearance. On the Appearance tab, add a title and summary information for the presentation. Your summary isn’t shown in the presentation, but displays with other identifying information when published to Acrobat Connect Pro. Choose a Theme from the Theme dropdown list to specify a color scheme, text and so on for the interface. Click Theme Editor to open a dialog where you can choose the sidebar location, panes, font, labels and other interface details.

Tip: Once you’ve customized a theme, save it for future use.

Playback. On the Playback tab, choose options such as auto play, pauses, looping and so on.

Quality. On the Quality tab, specify whether you want to use settings for computer playback, PDF, or Adobe Connect Pro. Also on this tab, choose audio and image qualities, and select Enable Preloading to download slides and/or embedded FLV content prior to playback.

Attachments. On the Attachments tab, locate and include files you want to include with the presentation, such as additional information (Figure 7). An attachment can be bundled with the presentation, or included as a link.

Figure 7: Attach or link content to the presentation

When your theme is complete, click OK to close the Presentation Settings dialog. Use the usual methods of testing and viewing slides in PowerPoint. When you’ve finished building and tweaking the content, the final stage is testing and publishing.

4. Publish the presentation

It isn’t necessary to use Adobe Connect Pro to run a presentation: Presenter offers exports in several formats.

Choose Adobe Presenter > Publish to open the dialog and choose an output option (Figure 8). The locations and options vary according to your output destination:

Choose My Computer to publish the presentation to your computer as SWF. Specify a folder location and whether to build a Zip or CD package. Publishing a SWF produces both a full-size presentation, as well as a Flash-lite presentation suitable for mobile devices.

Figure 8: Produce a SWF for mobile devices automatically

Choose Adobe Connect Pro to publish the presentation online. Specify the server, and whether to upload assets (audio, video and attachments) along with the presentation product.

Choose Adobe PDF to export as a SWF—including animations defined in PowerPoint—embedded in a PDF file. Select the storage location.

Figure 9: Specify published product types and features

Regardless of the option you choose, all publishing destinations display Project Information and let you configure settings and manage the slides. Once you have made your choices, click Publish to process the file and create the presentation.

I’ve given you a brief look at Presenter: Is it enough for you to do some investigating on your own? Can you see how it could enhance your work? I’d like to hear from you.

E-mail me !

Share this page

Comments for this tutorial are now closed.

donna baker

You add animation and sound using the tools in PowerPoint.

how to put the presentation in adobe presenter with animation and sound?

Try Acrobat DC

Get started >

Learn how to edit PDF.

Get started

Ask the Community

Post, discuss and be part of the Acrobat community.

Join now >

Related tutorials

Overview: Adobe Presenter

Using Adobe Presenter to augment PPT presentations

Adobe Presenter Q&A

Rearrange PDF pages

Convert PDF to JPG

Create PDF online

Convert Word to PDF online

Convert Excel to PDF online

Convert PowerPoint to PDF online

Convert JPG to PDF online

Compress PDF online

Sign Microsoft Word documents

Create electronic signatures

Create digital signatures

Create PDFs

Export PDFs

Combine Files

Review and Comment

Scan and Optimize

Protect PDFs

Sign and Send PDFs

Print Production

PDF Standards

Accessibility

Acrobat Reader