PDFs are documents whose original format and layout has been preserved, allowing users to view the document as it was originally formatted without the need to own the program in which it was created. All you need is the freely available Acrobat Reader and you can open the document and browse through it pretty much as its creator intended.

Almost everyone agrees that PDFs are a great thing but they can sometimes be rather difficult and tedious to navigate. That's where bookmarks come in handy: they are clickable headings which link to specific parts of the PDF document and enable you to get around a lot faster than scrolling or moving one page at a time.

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 one of the navigation panels normally displayed on the left of the Acrobat Reader screen. To show bookmarks, click on the bookmark icon or choose View - Navigation Panels - Bookmarks. Click on a bookmark to move to the page that it links to.

Bookmarks a must-have accessory for any PDF file that wants to call itself interactive. The bad news is, you can't create them with Acrobat Reader but, in any case, you can't create PDF files with Reader either. For both of these activities you need to purchase of the two commercial Acrobat products: Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Professional.

First, open the PDF using Acrobat Standard or Professional. Next, open the Bookmarks panel and scroll up or down to the page that the bookmark is going to take the user to. Click on the Options menu located in the top right of the Bookmarks panel and choose New Bookmark. Enter a descriptive name for the bookmark then do it all over again to create more bookmarks.

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.)

Better still, why not have your bookmarks automatically generated for you! The software utility AutoBookmark will generate bookmarks automatically based on the textual attributes of your PDF file such as font size and indentation.

Then there is Adobe's own PDFMaker, a utility for Microsoft Office 97, 2002 and 2003 which is automatically installed along with Acrobat Standard or Professional producing an extra menu in Office programs called "Adobe PDF" and an "Adobe PDFMaker" 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.

Some DTP packages will also automatically generate PDF bookmarks in a similar way to Microsoft Word (based on styles, indexes and tables of content), namely InDesign, QuarkXPress and Serif PagePlus. These three software applications have the added benefit that you don't actually need to buy Acrobat Standard or Professional to create your PDF files, since this facility is built-in to each of these great programs.

Bookmarks don't just take the user to a given page: they can do lots of other things as well. The first point we should make is, that strictly speaking bookmarks take the user to a view rather than to a page. Say, for example, you wanted to link to a close-up of a photo somewhere on a particular page, you just zoom in on the photo and then create your bookmark. That way, when the user clicks on the bookmark, they get taken not just to that page but also to the exact same zoom level.

If you want your bookmark to do something other than link to a view, first you must remove the default action. Right-clicking on a bookmark will display a pop-up menu from which you need to choose Properties. There are two tabs: General and Actions. Click on Actions, delete the default action by highlighting it and clicking on Delete then replace it with any of the ones in the Select Action drop-down menu.

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.