This is the transcript for 'Adobe PDF workflow for school based staff' webinar video.
Adam Astill:
Hello, and welcome to our webinar on PDF workflows this afternoon. My name's Adam Astill, a Digital Learning Advisor with the Department of Education, and I'm joined by Megan Anderson, who's also a Digital Learning Advisor with the Department of Education. We are going to discuss a range of PDF workflows today. Bear in mind the chat is there to pop your questions in. Now, this webinar is tailored towards school-based staff. So if you are an educational support staff in the webinar today, there is a specific one we are doing for ESS staff. It is available tomorrow and you can register for that via a link that will be popped into the chat, but this one is primarily focused at school-based staff. One thing also to remember is that we are doing a lot of live demonstrations, so save your questions towards the end. We may answer a number of those during our live demonstrations as we sort of work through different workflows in both Microsoft products, in Google, and through Adobe Express and Canva.
So I'd just like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands in which we gather on today from all across New South Wales. Personally, I'm coming to you from Barkindji country in the far southwest of the state, and that wonderful image is from Mungo National Park in the far southwest of the state. Now, it borders four lands, Barkindji, Ngyiampaa, Mutthi Mutthi and Paakantyi, and those people have cared for the land for many, many thousands of years. Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area is the resting place of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady, and those are the oldest planet's ritual burials from over 42,000 years ago. So it's a very significant place for our First Nations people. So I'd just like to pay my respect to elders past and present, and extend that to Aboriginal people joining us today in our meeting.
So what are we going to run through today, Megan? Well, we're going to firstly look at the changes in licencing around our Adobe products and why that occurred and where the current state is at. We're going to look at do you need a licence with the full Creative Cloud, or do you need to just adapt your workflows to use of a new or existing product? We're going to go through examples and live demonstrations on working with PDFs in the Microsoft space as I mentioned, but also we're going to touch on and give some demonstrations around Adobe Express and the new ways and new workflows that you have available to you.
We're also going to look at Canva as a PDF edit alternative. We do have access to Canva across our department for free and through our single sign-on as well. And finally, we're going to have a look at some of the resources we have out there both on the T4L website, but also included in the resource package that you will get in the follow-up to this webinar along with the recording. So sit back today, watch and take it all in, but by all means if you do want to follow along, have a look at the recording afterwards because there is a lot to get through in this hour and we do move at a pretty quick pace.
So why have there been licencing changes across the department with our Adobe contract? So the existing contract ended towards the end of Term 1, and the data that we were provided showed that less than 30% of licences across the department were being actively used. So quite a number of staff all across various areas of the department weren't actually logging in and using their licence. So we had to have a rethink about the number of licences being provided and purchased by the department, and we used that data to form a base, but also added in some overflow on that as well. So we had an extended buffer if there was the need.
Currently, there are very, very limited licences left. So if you're watching this today and you've sort of thought, "Well, hang on, what's been demonstrated here, I can do that with my PDFs in either Adobe Express or in Canva," would love it if you could hand your licence back, particularly if you have a licence and don't necessarily need it, because at this point in time we're prioritising teaching staff who are using the full Creative Cloud licence in their teaching practise and those apps we're talking about are Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, all those multimedia apps. We're also prioritising students in those subjects as well, starting at year 12 and year 11 and then working our way down. So that's a bit of an overview on why there've been some changes to the licencing agreement, and as I mentioned, if at the end of the webinar you feel that you don't need a licence and you've got a licence, by means contact us at the Creative Cloud Licencing Inbox, and we'll pop that email address into the chat, but it allows us to just redistribute that licence to someone who needs it.
So do you actually need a Creative Cloud licence for this? And we've come up with a bit of an infographic here. Now, this is PowerPoint Live, so if you click on the area down in that bottom right-hand corner here, you will actually be taken to that full infographic. So on the left-hand side, free for everyone as part of the department's agreement with Adobe, is access to Acrobat Reader. Now, that is a default piece of software that is pushed out as part of the standard department image that allows you to view, print, share, sign and comment in digital ink on PDFs without the need for a licence. So that is available to everyone. Also, available under our department agreement for everyone is Adobe Express, so that is allowing of PDF edits, combining pages, changing document formats as well. There's a couple of other apps that are sort of in there as well, particularly Fresco and Firefly for AI purposes and image generation, but it's on the right-hand side of this infographic that you do need the full licence for.
Now, we're going to get into Acrobat Pro in a moment about do you actually really need that, but it's really the full Creative Cloud apps. So Character Animator, if you're doing animation, Photoshop, if you're doing high-end photo edits, Premiere Pro as well if you're doing high-end movie editing and film editing, and Adobe Illustrator as well if you are doing that high-end I guess graphic design and need to use vectors and such. We do have some alternatives out there as well, particularly if you're using a laser cutter, but more information will be provided on the T4L resource site, but today we really want to focus around those PDF workflows.
And so we've examined all the options across Adobe Reader, Adobe Express and also Acrobat Pro and come up with this, I'm going to call it a flow chart for want of a better word. I guess it's the menu selector of which one do you actually need. So if we start with Reader there, you've got the various functions that we mentioned earlier, so view, print and comment. You can access and share files from any device. Most importantly, you can fill, sign, and use a digital certificate within Reader. So if you're signing documents, you don't need the full Creative Cloud licence. You can also draw, highlight and annotate within Reader. So if you're using a PDF as part of your teaching programme and you might be using a digital ink on an interactive panel and using Acrobat to display that particular document, you don't need the full licence to be able to draw and annotate on that document.
If we move across to Adobe Express, it can do all of the functions that Reader does it except for filling, signing and using the digital certificate. What it can also do in addition to that is convert documents to and from PDF format, you can edit text and images within a PDF in Adobe Express and you can also combine and organise pages within express as well. If we move to the final column, which is Acrobat Pro, which does require the full licence, the only real reason that you need Acrobat Pro is if you are creating a fillable form, so you actually are creating those particular fields that people need to insert information to, or you are redacting text. Now, when we talk about redacting text, we're talking about large amounts of text within that and that you are regularly redacting text. So by regular, I guess we're sort of talking it's part of your regular job flow that you're doing at least two to three times per week. Any questions there so far about our PDF so far, Megan?
Megan Anderson:
Nothing. It's very quiet in the chat. You are welcome to use the chat if you've got any questions, but we are doing live demos on all of those things in the first two columns there that Adam's spoken about. I guess our role today is just to educate you on how you can use the products that you have available to you for free, and it may involve... If you've noticed that the licence change has made things a little bit difficult with your existing workflow, it might involve a little bit of a habit change, so we just encourage you to watch all of the demos, and then when you get the recording, you can slow it down and watch along at whatever speed you like. Both Reader and Express, we'll do demos on those, but if you are looking at sign, you can definitely do that with the Reader.
Adam Astill:
So I guess when we get into working PDFs, we really need to define what editing a PDF is, and you are editing a PDF if you are changing the existing text or the features on the document, and this particularly comes around to fillable forms, creating those fillable fields, whether they be text fields, image fields, checkboxes, dropdown menus, you are editing the PDF document. If you are redacting text as well, and that means taking out that text so it is either blacked over, I guess that's the digital alternative of getting the old big thick black texture and putting lines over it, that is editing the PDF. However, you're not editing the PDF if you are just completing the fillable area of a document, if it's been set up as a form, and quite often you can get that hint by the background may be blue or white and when you click on it, a cursor may appear.
If you're adding your own text box, you're not editing a PDF, that can sort of come in and be completed in both Reader and also Express. If you're using digital inking tools, you're not editing the PDF, that can be done in Reader, but it can also be done in the Microsoft Edge browser and saved to the document, so it is there moving forward, and as we mentioned earlier, signing and adding a digital certificate or a signature is not actually editing a PDF. So quite often people think, "Oh, I'm editing a PDF so I need a licence or I use PDFs all the time." Quite often we're just viewing them or just adding things to them that aren't actually fully editing those PDFs.
So there's a couple of things we're going to go through here, and I'll take you through the resources that we've got. These will all be in the slide deck resource that you will get following the webinar, usually comes through about in 24 hours after the event, but it is PowerPoint Live, so as I mentioned before, the underlying links here are clickable and it will take you to the various resource. So in this one here we've designed some quick reference guys about setting your default PDF viewer. So for Mac, Windows 11 or Windows 10, depending on the operating system you're using, there are slightly different looks to how you can set that default app and we'll go through that in a moment about how that process looks, but it's very handy if you're just looking and viewing it PDFs on a regular basis, setting that as Microsoft Edge or Acrobat Reader does actually give you that functionality that you may need.
So our options in Microsoft that we're going to go through today, we're going to talk about creating a PDF from Microsoft documents and also saving an email as a PDF within Outlook also. We're going to talk about some workflows within the Microsoft apps, so creating that PDF, saving and then downloading the PDF. You'll notice there there's three different options and we're going to go through those options, be it save a copy, printing as a PDF, or exporting as a PDF also. And finally we're going to use the Microsoft Edge browser in this first part of the webinar and the demonstration on how to actually digitally annotate, rotate, and also I guess translate and get it to read aloud the document as well for some accessibility reasons that you may need that document read to you. So let's start getting into our demos as well. Before we start though, there is one more and that's also we're going to look at creating a PDF from a Google Workspace app as well.
So Megan, I might share my screen, I might pop everyone into a bit of a minimization here and shift across the screen here, and we're going to look first off at setting our default PDF viewer. So I've just clicked in the search bar down here and I'm going to type in apps, and now whether you're on Windows 11, which I'm on, or whether you're still on Windows 10, typing in apps will look the same. If you're on a Mac, please refer to that guide as the workflow is slightly different. So if I had to click on default apps, it'll take me into a window where every one of my various file types and default apps will list. Up in the top here I can just type PDF, and it will give me the option of selecting that particular file type. Now, at the moment my default is Microsoft Edge. If I want to change that, I can click on it and then I've got the ability to set it as Reader or Chrome, or any other option that I would like.
Now, we have a question that sometimes gets asked to us, "Why would I use one over the other?" Now, if I'm just annotating or inserting text onto a PDF, I'm going to use Microsoft Edge for that. Even if I'm just reading and viewing it, and say, I've opened up a resource and I just want to have a look at it, I'm going to use Microsoft Edge. However, if I'm filling and signing and putting a digital signature or certificate onto a PDF, I'm then going to use Acrobat Reader, and we'll go through in a moment how to actually set or... We've gone through setting. How to actually use one of the other apps to open a PDF that's not in the default method.
So I can just hit set default there and that will be sorted. Now, if I go to my PDFs, let's just have a look on my desktop here. I've got one available. If I right-click on this document. Right-click, there we go. You'll notice I've got open and that's my default view. I can open it in Edge, but I've also got this second option here, open with the little arrow, and I can then choose to open it in Reader. So if it's a file that I have to sign or put a certificate on or comment on, I'm going to select Reader from here and all it will is just boot up into Reader. So that's, I guess, how we deal with our default settings within opening our PDFs.
Megan Anderson:
Before you move on, Adam, we do have a question. Is there a difference between using Edge or Chrome?
Adam Astill:
Very good point. If I use Chrome, Chrome is really just a PDF viewer. There's not a lot you can do with Chrome. So if I open this one up in Chrome, you'll see I can view the PDF, I might be able to rotate it around, we'll do a full 360 there, but I can download and print it. I can't really digitally ink, I can't sign it. It's purely just in its raw form a PDF viewer. Yeah, if you're wanting to do more with your PDFs, Edge or Acrobat Reader is what is your go-to for those.
Megan Anderson:
And Adam now's probably a good time to talk about an Acrobat Reader not being visible as one of the options.
Adam Astill:
That's right. In terms of Reader not being visible, so I only have Reader on my... If I just type in Adobe here. I only have Reader on my device. If your device has Acrobat Pro-
Megan Anderson:
Or DC. It's got a few names.
Adam Astill:
It does. It does.
Megan Anderson:
Depending on when you downloaded it. Yep.
Adam Astill:
Yep, definitely. You still have access to all the features that you do within Reader. Some may look slightly different, some may appear in different spots. We found out today that digital inking will appear in the comment function of Acrobat Pro or DC, but you won't have access to the premium features such as editing, converting fillable forms unless you have the licence, and you'll notice by the fact if you go to click on that function, it will give you the popup, "Contact your IT support." It may also show... And I'll just going to hover over here. It may also show this little blue star if you're hovering over a particular tool within Acrobat Pro or DC, and that will indicate that that's a premium feature and you don't have access to it, or-
Megan Anderson:
And it doesn't matter which Acrobat programme you have on your device, you don't need to take any action to do what we're going to show you today.
Adam Astill:
No, definitely. The look may be slightly different, but yeah, you definitely don't need to take any action on it. Let's get into some workflows and I'm going to start with the web version of Word. So I've got my Word document here, just a simple text document, and there's three ways that I can turn this into a PDF. So if I go to File and I can go to Print... Oh, sorry. Let's start with Save As. So I can go to Save As, and I can download that as a PDF, or I can save a copy online and it will come up with that and I can create a copy. Probably if you're in the Word online version though, doing the download copy as a PDF without comments or with comments, depending on what you want, that will... Just if I can hit Download. Your document is ready, I can hit Download, it will pop up in my downloads folder and there I've got the PDF.
Another way I can do it in Word online is if I hit File and Print, I can print this document, it will prepare it to print. Now, when I go to select the printer, you'll notice I've got Save as PDF, but I've also got Microsoft Print to PDF. Now, some people if they've had an Acrobat licence or an Adobe licence on their computer, they may have had a plug-in installed that says Print to Adobe PDF. That function won't work. You will get the error message and you need a licence for this message, okay? Unless you are fully licenced, it won't work. So the best option is to go Microsoft Print to PDF, and you can do it that way. If I just hit Print, I then get that in my folder here.
One different that is in the desktop version of Word and I'll just flick over to that now is in the File section we've got Export, and if I click on Export, you'll notice that there's this particular tile here. Again, if you've had a licence or Acrobat Pro, we're finding, on there previously, you will get a create an Adobe PDF additional tile on there. I haven't had Pro on my device so that tile doesn't appear. That tile won't work though, you will need to go to this particular Create PDF/XPS tile and as soon as I hit that it will ask me to put it into my various file saving location.
Megan Anderson:
I found this, Adam, is something that everybody has got a different workflow for. I found there's so many different ways that you can do this because your workflow is even different to mine and my workflow has always worked for me and there's been no difference now that I don't have a licence. So if you're doing it a different way, it might still work. So go with what works, if not, these options work as well.
Adam Astill:
Exactly. Let's go to... Hopefully I can get underneath my Stop Sharing. No, let's just open... Where are we? Let's open Outlook. So quite often we'll have emails that we do need to print, and for example, let's go with my WeVideo email here. Now, if I want to print this email as a PDF, I can just go to the three dots or I can go up to my Print icon in my ribbon here. Now, web-based Outlook is very, very similar in its look to new Outlook that you may be using. Old Outlook is slightly different. You'll need to go across to the File dropdown menu on the left-hand side and then select Print.
But here, once it's up, I just need to select Print and I should have a popup window that comes up pretty soon. Joys of live TV. Let's just close and hit that print again. Not going to do it for me, Megan. Let's try this way. Print. I wonder if it's because I've got that. Let's try another one. Print. There we go. And again, I just need to select that Microsoft Print to PDF function and it will print out that particular email. So why would I do that? I guess if I've got some correspondence there from someone that I need to print and file away or attach it later, I can do that and turn that email into a PDF this way.
All right, and next step is our annotation on a PDF in Edge. There we go. There's the first one popping up there that we tried to get to, and again, you can see Microsoft Print to PDF is the option here. What I'm going to do, I'll come back to Acrobat in a moment, but I'm just going to open this up in Edge, and it just jumped onto my other monitor there. Here we go. So you'll notice across the top here I've got all my various drawing tools, okay? I've got a highlighter, so if I click on the highlighter, I can just highlight that as we go. If I've got drawing tools here, I can use my Stylus if I want to, to circle and highlight things or direct people there. I can write on things there. Very good trying to use a pen in an upright fashion there. If I don't like things, I've got my eraser tool here.
So these are all tools that we've got access to, to adjust our PDFs in our teaching practise that are free to us. We don't need a licence to do any of this. If I want to put a text box in there, I can just click on the text icon, click down the bottom here and I can just add text this way, like that. I can change the font size if I want to there, I can change the colour, the line spacing and so forth. So I've just added text to this without being actually in Acrobat at all. One of the other great things, and let's go click off the draw tool, is this read aloud function. Now I'm going to hopefully share my sound, Megan, and hit Read Aloud and hopefully it comes through. So just give me a nod if it does.
Automated:
ICT capabilities and digital technologies. English early stage one.
Adam Astill:
So you can see there, we've instantly got accessibility on this PDF from a viewer point of view within the Edge browser, so really great options. I can also change those voice options as well. If I don't like Microsoft William, I can change to a various different language, or I can change to Natasha there. If I want to translate the document, I've got the ability to do that as well. It'll translate the whole document or sections. If I want to zoom in, I've got my functions there. If I want to rotate there and so forth. Now, if I want to save this document either as a different file type or with my inking on there, all I need to do is just come to one of these options here. I've got my Save, which will save it in the original file, or I can Create a New File there as well. So rather than going to Reader to do these items, I've stuck just in the Edge browser and I'm able to do these digital ink functions and adding.
Let's move on to Acrobat, and particularly around adding those certificates or digital signatures. You'll notice here, before I jump into that, here's all my digital inking tools. So if I just wanted to, again, draw, I've got that functional menu there that I can attach to. Over on the left-hand side and sometimes depending on the version you're using, as Megan will attest to this, it may appear across the top, it may appear on the right-hand side. It just depends which version you're using. You may even have to click More Tools to make these available. What I can do is I can hit More, and there's two that I want to focus on. I want to focus on Fill & Sign and Use a Certificate.
So if I need to sign a document, there's two ways. Let's go with Fill & Sign and I'll get rid of that signature to start with. You may come up with a blank signature here, and I want to insert one. Now, it'll give me a few options. I can just type this in and there's my text style of signature. If I've got an image of my signature, I can upload that in there, or I can draw my signature within here as well. So let's see how my signing goes.
Megan Anderson:
So neat, Adam.
Adam Astill:
I know. I'm taking my pen off there, just I need to make sure I press a bit firmer. But really importantly, once you've got your signature in there, make sure that this box is checked so it'll save that signature for further use. I can just hit Apply, it'll pop me back out into my document and here's my signature. Now, if I want to use that, I can just hover over, it'll drag it onto the document, and I just need to click there and it will place that signature within the document. If I want to make it bigger or smaller, I can do that too. Similarly, if I want to add initials, I can go through the same process as that. Again, I don't have a licence to do this, I'm doing this all within a free version of Acrobat.
If I want to add the digital certificate, and sometimes this is a more common way that we've associated with signing documents, because this actually provides that timestamp of when it was actually signed. So all I need to do is hit Digitally Sign, it'll give me a prompt to say use my mouse, click and drag so I define the area that the signature or the certificate is going to go in. So you'll notice I get some crosshairs here. Let's draw an area and it will ask me to sign in with a digital ID. Now, if I haven't got one created, obviously it'll ask me to create a new one and that's very easy, you can just click that and go through the processes, but I'm just going to insert my signature here and click Continue. This is what it'll look like.
I've got the ability to lock the document after signing as well, so no one can make any edits, particularly handy if I've drawn and annotated on there as well. If I don't like the look of that standard text... I have only got the standard text option today, so it'll keep it as that. I can hit Sign. It will then give me the option to save that particular PDF with that certificate in there. Yes, let's go override it. And there's my digital certificate there. So again, we're not in a licenced version and we're still able to put our digital certificate and our signatures onto our documents. How are we going there, Megan? Anything in the background relating to-
Megan Anderson:
Looking good. It's very quiet in here today actually. A few things that I'm going to demo in a little bit in Express, mainly going the other way if you want to turn something from PDF into a different file, but I will show that in Express. I think that was very thorough.
Adam Astill:
I think, Megan, let's get into our Express demo and we'll roll with that, particularly around adding pages, organising pages, but most importantly, being able to edit that existing text within a PDF.
Megan Anderson:
Yeah, okay. Well, I will take control of the screen now and I guess the biggest change when using Adobe Express is that it's not a programme that's on our computer, it's actually a cloud-based one and we can set it up as an essential, so that's what we'll do first. There's lots of benefits to this, being able to get to any of our documents at any time, but it's also really nice and easy to get to. So first of all, I need to add it to my essentials. So I would go to edit my essentials, and I've done this demo a few times so you can see that it has come up there as recently used, but if you are first doing this, you need to go to add new essentials, and you can just type in Adobe and it's this rainbow ' A' here, Adobe Express, and we'll just add that.
Now, it's also nice to know, seeing we're talking to lots of school-based staff[ that students have access to this as well and theirs is already in their portal. So once it's in your portal, you can just select that. Now, this link is a direct single sign-on link, so it goes through a few loading pages while it uses that single sign-on link in combination with your portal and will take you straight to your login dashboard so you don't need to log in, but if you ever are asked to log in with anything Adobe, you'll always use your @det email address.
Okay, so as soon as the dashboard loads, if you are a Canva user, you'll notice that there are some similarities in the function of what Adobe Express does. So what Adobe Express is, is actually it started off as a graphic design tool, but it is great because it brings in all of those professional high-end Adobe tools in this really nice simplified way to use it. In fact, I use it with K - 2 all the time. I think it's really nice and easy to use. I could talk about this all day, but I'm here just to talk about PDF functions, so we'll get into that.
The first one I want to talk about is these Quick actions. They are down here, Quick actions, but this landing page tends to change sometimes, so I'm going to point you to the big purple plus in the top left-hand corner and it's automatically on this Create tab, and I'm going to go over to the Quick actions tab, and you'll see all of these, remove background there, which is a game-changer, all of these things that you can do really quickly. So if we're specifically talking about converting to a PDF, that was one of the questions in here, we can click on that and we can tap or just drag and drop any file at all. So I've just opened my File Explorer here, got some files here. This is a Word doc, but it will also work with PowerPoints and Excel documents, that question was in the chat. So I can just drop that in there.
You might notice a little bit of a longer loading time because we're cloud-based, but that's something that we can work around, and there's my Word document and I just hit Download. You can see I've got a few options. Again, very similar to those markup options that we had in Reader, and then it's just a simple download and put it wherever you would like, and that's it.
Adam Astill:
Question that we have using the cloud-based product, is this secure?
Megan Anderson:
Excellent question. We have confirmed that these quick actions are secure and we've confirmed that with the department security team. Reason being it short-term saves in the cache, but then the cache is cleared once you've downloaded it. I will show you another way, we call it detailed editing, a little bit later on. At this point we haven't had that confirmed because what happens with the detailed one is it actually saves in your projects, but this part here doesn't save anywhere and it has been confirmed that this is a secure way to deal with confidential PDFs.
Okay, so moving on. That was converting to a PDF. Other options we've got in here, again converting from PDFs. So if you wanted all your workflows to be in here, you can do very similar things to what Adam was showing before. Convert from PDF. There it is. You've got a search bar there as well if you're looking for something specific, and it's exactly the same thing, just dragging and dropping. So from a PDF, there we go, dragging and dropping, and then you'll see the choices I get here of what to convert it. So I can choose Excel, Rich Text Format, Word and image files, such as JPGs or PNGs. And then again, a simple download and you've got commenting, highlighting and drawing function as well.
Editing's always a big question. Now, we've got two ways. So this way here in quick actions is a really nice quick way. It's also the secure way. So I will drag a document in here and show you what I mean. You've got the limited options here. So you can change your text and your images really easily. Probably the same options as you would've had in Pro actually with the editing, so you can obviously get into all of the little text boxes there and change those.
Adam Astill:
Having this quick edit function, being able to sort of quickly replace text and images, particularly if you don't want to go into a detailed aspect of the document, is a really, really handy way to edit that PDF. One aspect though, if you have been sent a PDF that's been flattened because the user either locked it or they've wanted to send it flat, you won't have the ability to edit the text. It will just pull it in and direct it as an image. Now, that is the same in Acrobat Pro if you had a licence. It will just identify that as a full image and then not allow you to actually edit the process there.
Megan Anderson:
The other way of editing I'll show you in a moment, but I'm going to stay in Quick actions for a moment because I know this question came up, and then it's combined files and organised files. So I played in a bit here in the last few weeks and I actually prefer for both of those things to go to organise pages. And what we can do here is drag in our PDF again. There we go. I'll drag in one that's got four pages. There's lots of images in this file. It does take a little bit, but once it's up it's actually really easy to organise the pages and drag them around, and then add new documents as well.
Pardon me. You'll also see when we get in here, once it loads, there's a few other options in terms of rotating pages as well, but I actually find the Adobe Express window is so much easier to work with than Acrobat Reader as well. I'll just come back to that, just changing your workflow or you habit it a little bit. Once they're in there, you can just drag them around like this, and you can rotate certain pages and then you've got that. Oh, you can add extra ones if you want to, extra pages there, and then you can hit Download.
Adam Astill:
Now while you're here, Megan, if I wanted to extract, say, page two from that, how would I go about that?
Megan Anderson:
I can select just one page, and here you can see... So just by the little tick box there and you've got just one page selected there, and we can download just that one page. The other option is to delete the pages that you don't want with the garbage bin and download that file. So I just find that really, really easy to work with. That's our quick actions, but now I want to show you the other way, which we haven't confirmed the security of this for confidential things. If you're in this space and you're really interested, you can probably pass your details. I know that our director is in the chat there and she can pass that information on.
But I'm just going to go... I'm just still on the dashboard here and I'm going to go into what we're calling our detailed editing mode, and it even offers a lot more than Pro used to. And to do that I'm going to just grab a PDF and drag it straight into the desktop here, dragged straight into this landing page and it uploads. You can do this with any file and you can see it's uploading those four pages now. I love on the right while you wait, you get little tips sometimes, it shows you what you can do. It's doing all the selling for me. You can see that you can add all of these extra things and really get a really nice graphic design feel with your file. So it's opened in here as all different elements that we can work with, and you'll see we've got editing functions like before, but much more detailed. So I can edit text, but these are all the text options I've got.
Adam Astill:
I suppose as a teacher in a workflow situation, if I'm designing a worksheet or a poster from a PDF starting point, this is where I can bring it in and adjust it to my particular needs. I might have downloaded something that I think, "Oh, this is really great, but I sort of need to change the text to identify it as well." I had a question the other day, Megan, about New South Wales Foundation font and that is also something we're working with Adobe with to try and get it uploaded into Express. There's a bit of a process with it. You can't just upload your own fonts into it as a personal user, but as a backend manager we are able to, so we're working through that particular process there.
Megan Anderson:
Yeah, that will be great when that happens. Yeah, the other great thing that we've got here is options to images, so we can easily just drag things around and delete things, but then we've also got in the media file access to Adobe Stock for free. You don't need to worry about copyright, you have access to everything in here so you can upload your own, and I have got one that I actually use Adobe Firefly for free to make. There we go. I asked for a pink robot. But also in media, you'll see that you've got access to all of these options down here. My little robot's taking a little while to load. There we go. So the image library here is incredible as well. So that is editing in Adobe Express.
What I want to do now is actually jump into Canva, because if you were already a Canva user, you would've looked at Adobe Express and thought, "Well, that feels familiar," and you can actually use Canva as well. So if you're a Canva user, I encourage you to use Canva, and it's got a very similar workflow in that you can, and this was a game-changer when I found this out, you can go to upload, but you can also just drag and drop here too. So I'm going to actually do the same file in here. I won't spend too much time in Canva. If you are already a Canva user, you probably already know a lot about this. So it's importing my file, works with other files as well, not just PDFs, and it appears down in my recent designs in my projects as well. And then you just open it up and you've got that regular Canva space that you would feel very comfortable working. Did lose a little bit of the formatting. You can see the colours changed a little bit there, shouldn't be too hard to fix that up.
I don't know if anyone has seen Magic Grab. I'm just going to grab something that's got text in it, I'll see how we go here in edit image here. So if you've got a photo of something, you can go into the... I've gone into the edit image tools here, and you can go into the Magic Studio and go to grab text, and what that does is it uses AI to have a look at all of the text that's in that image. So if you've got a photo of a document that you want to turn into something like a PDF, this might be a workflow that works for you. How are we going with all those demos there? Adam, any more questions in the chat?
Adam Astill:
No, but I'd like you to demo something that I worked on today as a different workflow for just extracting pages, because I was working with a principal today and we found that when we uploaded a document that had a lot of handwriting into it into Express, it identified some of the loops within the handwriting as actually circles and filled them in. So if you go back out to the document, Megan, and our wonderful resource card we've got there, and just hit the grid view down on the bottom. Yep, the four squares there. So this gives me an overview of the documents. Now, if I want to just pull a page out or just combine a couple of pages that are together, I can also reorganise pages in this view as well. So as Megan's showing there, she can sort of drag those pages into any order that she likes.
But if I hit Share and then go to my Download button from there, and select PDF as a file type, what I can do is I can either select All pages or I can select certain pages in there to download as a PDF file. So if I want pages one and three, I can hit done, and that will download as a separate PDF file just those particular pages. So if you've got a large document and you just want a couple of pages out of it, this is a way that you can do that within Canva as well. And as we mentioned, Canva's free. You've got a tile in your portal, it may not appear straight away. You can just go to Manage My Essentials, and search for the Canva tile in there. So it does look like that, a fantastic tool not only for our design, but as we've also discovered for managing and organising those PDF files.
Megan Anderson:
Now, before we do wrap up, you can throw any other questions of things we didn't get to in there, but if you would like to click along with me because it's much more likely to stay in your head, I'm just going to type into Google now, T4L Adobe and it will take you to where all of the resources that we talked about today can be found. So it's this T4L, stands for Technology 4 Learning, that's our team, and we are going to jump into the Adobe stuff. This is the Adobe for Education page. While you're here, poke around, there might be some other things. We also work with vendors of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Canva, so there's lots of resources for those here as well as our magazines. But specifically when we're talking about working with PDFs, Adobe for Education is the parent page, and all of these things that Adam spoke about are here, how to log in as well, and then underneath that parent page you'll see there's an Adobe Express page and Adobe Acrobat page.
So anything you want to know about Express can be found here and it's growing daily. And then the Acrobat page, this is where you'll find every single how to guide down here in the T4L support guides. In these accordion menus, you'll see everything that we talked about here, but broken down into mostly single page. I knew I was going to open a double page. They're mostly one pages. This one has two pages, but you can see how easy they are to follow along. Now before we go, I do also want to add if that was something that you think either you'd like to do again or other staff that you work with should see, we are doing another one, another session, just like this next Wednesday. Have you got the link for that, Adam?
Adam Astill:
It's being generated, but it will be on the T4L events page.
Megan Anderson:
It's ready to go. I've got it here.
Adam Astill:
Oh, fantastic.
Megan Anderson:
Yeah. No, Adam, Adam Pullinger was very fast with that. There we go. So that's on next Wednesday at 3:30 if you want to pass that link onto anyone else, but you'll also get the recording from this. And again, we encourage you to, we do this all the time, watch a recording and then watch it back in slow motion or pause while I click on things and then press play. So feel free to do that with the recording. You'll also get the slides as well.
Adam Astill:
As Megan said, thank you very much for joining us today. If you have a licence and realise you don't need it, or if you've applied for a licence and you don't need it, please, please, please contact us at AdobeCreativeCloudlicensing@det.nsw.edu.au. Megan, hopefully you can pop that address in the chat as well if people need to refer to it, because we really want to get those licences to the people who are using the full Creative Cloud products and not necessarily those that can change their workflow in the way that they work with PDFs to how we've shown this afternoon.
Megan Anderson:
We did mention it... Sorry, Adam.
Adam Astill:
No, no.
Megan Anderson:
I was just going to say we did mention at the start, but if you joined us a minute late, it was right at the start, and you were from corporate, we are doing an education support start webinar tomorrow at, is it 11:30, Adam?
Adam Astill:
11:00.
Megan Anderson:
11:00 tomorrow, and we will touch on things that more linked to your context. So today was all for the classroom really and for the office, and we're going to look at Flex and stuff like that at tomorrow's session if you would like. I think there was a question I just saw scrolling through with all of those thank yous. You're welcome. It's great to be able to get the word out about this, because it's obviously caused a little bit of a panic, but when we find out actually what it does and what we can do, it's really not that scary at all, is it?
Adam Astill:
No. We'll pop that link to the educational support staff session into the chat as well, so if you're searching for that, that will be in there. A big thank you to everyone who's come along this afternoon, a reminder that you will get the recording as well as that resource slide deck in the next 24 hours, but many thanks for joining us and enjoy your afternoon. Bye for now.
Megan Anderson:
Thanks, everyone. See you.
End of transcript.