Help your creative team go paperless with Adobe Acrobat

By Ana Perez April 18, 2023

“Paperless office” gets thrown around as a buzzword a lot lately. But do you know what it would really take to eliminate paper from your team’s workflows? Going paperless means you need to rely on digitised documents and all your processes need to be revised, and Adobe Acrobat is a powerful tool you can rely on to get you there. The pandemic may have accelerated the push towards digitisation, but companies had been slowly switching to paperless processes for years due to their many benefits.

Why go paperless?

There are many general benefits of going paperless. For starters, you will be saving money: there’s of course the fact that you’ll use less paper and ink, but you’ll also be reducing storage costs and you’ll no longer need to buy and maintain printers.

Another important point is that going paperless is great for the environment: from saving the trees and water that it takes to produce paper to limiting your greenhouse gas emissions and reducing waste. Protecting natural resources is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing in our time, and this could take you one step closer to smashing your company’s environmental goals.

A paperless workflow will also improve the productivity of your team and increase security across your business. In this article, we’ll explore how specific features of Acrobat support this, so read on to find out more details.

If you are going paperless, like with any other big change in your business, it’s key that you put a plan in place before changing any workflows. We recommend checking in with your team first. By holding a meeting with the relevant staff, you can get visibility on which processes would be improved by going paperless and what challenges the team is facing.

Next, we’ll break down some of the most useful functions of Adobe Acrobat and see how they can be used to help you move towards paperless workflows.

Convert

With Adobe Acrobat, you can not only create PDFs from other file types, but you can also turn PDFs into editable file types like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more.

When you create a PDF file with Adobe Acrobat, your file will have all the built-in Adobe security features. The process is quick and easy, supports any file size and retains quality. It offers you flexibility and saves you time when implementing your paperless workflow, as you won’t have to type up several different versions of the same file.

Proofreading made easy

Adobe Acrobat is an excellent choice for the proofreading stage of your workflow, especially if you need to involve both members of your team and external stakeholders, as the software will send the amends directly to the next person in the chain and provide visibility to those who need it. As well as highlight and underline sections and leave written comments, you can draw directly onto the document and even use different colours to keep things organised.

Sometimes it can be difficult to compare amends between two documents without overlooking anything. The software can also compare two documents automatically to see what has been changed between versions, which saves you time and prevents human error.

Creating a solid approval workflow is key to increasing collaboration across the team and the improving quality of the final document. Using Adobe Acrobat will also help you reduce errors and strengthen your proofreading checks. Your documents are always easy to locate, and by automating these processes, you reduce the potential for errors as you streamline your review workflow.

Editing PDFs

You may think that making small amends would require to go back to the original InDesign files, but Adobe Acrobat actually lets you amend PDF files directly. This functionality is a real time-saver and is perfect for fixing typos, rearrange the layout, add a paragraph or even an image. The flexibility of this function is amplified by the fact that it’s also available in the mobile app, meaning you can make amends from anywhere.

Improve accessibility

Adobe Acrobat comes packed with accessibility tools, so it’s easy to create accessible PDFs and check if your document complies with any standards you need to meet – you can even get a report to confirm it. It’s a powerful tool to ensure compliance with legislation and equal access for disabled colleagues and customers.

Redact information

With Adobe Acrobat Pro you can redact any section of a document, even entire pages. This does more than placing a black box over the text: it removes the information irretrievably from the document, ensuring it cannot be recovered by anyone. You can also remove hidden information like metadata or hidden comments. This was, you can ensure security when publishing documents that contain some sensitive information.

Merge

The merging capabilities of Acrobat allow you to combine multiple files, even if they’ve been exported from different source files across programmes like Photoshop or InDesign. This means you can easily unify all the content you need for client delivery. You can even combine a PDF with other file types, like Word documents or Excel spreadsheets.

You can access this feature from the mobile app too, so you can sort out those last-minute details from anywhere. It’s easy to organise and navigate, and allows you to be more productive by spending less time on repetitive tasks and managing physical paperwork, for example retyping documents or manually collating files.

Signatures

Most people are familiar with Adobe Acrobat Sign’s ability to allow you to sign documents. However, this functionality goes beyond that: you can also request signatures from clients or remote staff, and with Acrobat Pro you get unlimited Sign functionality – a true all-in-one PDF and signature solution. Acrobat Sign Solutions APIs can even be integrated with your client portal to automatically fill in forms if needed, saving you even more time. You can set it up so copies of signed documents are automatically sent to all parties instantly, so everyone is kept updated. You might be wondering if this type of electronic signatures are legally binding or meet privacy requirements – and you can rest assured they do. Adobe can even provide an audit trail if you need it.

Going paperless in itself can protect you against your documents being lost, stolen, or not disposed of properly, but without a secure solution for your workflows, you still run the risk of your data being leaked. Adobe Acrobat allows you to password-protect everything, protecting and securing your documents.

Pricing breakdowns

An Adobe Acrobat by itself licence is affordable. This is the most cost-effective choice if you’re currently just using one Adobe app and need Acrobat, but don’t need any other Adobe products, for example if you’re part of a creative team but don’t do design or animation because you’re in charge of finance, management, or copywriting instead.

However, Adobe Acrobat Pro also comes built into Adobe Creative Cloud. This means that if you’re already using two or more Adobe apps on a single app licence and need Acrobat, it might be more cost effective to upgrade to Creative Cloud instead. This will not only save you money, but also open up all the other apps in the suite to you, allowing you to explore the new possibilities that these amazing programmes open.

Pricing options for Acrobat Pro (on a 12-month term):

• 1-9 users - £171.06 ex VAT per user.
• 10-49 users - £163.96 ex VAT per user.
• 50+ users - £155.04 ex VAT per user.

Pricing options for Acrobat Creative Cloud (on a 12-month term):

• 1-9 users - £744 ex VAT per user.
• 10-49 users - £717.96 ex VAT per user.
• 50+ users - £692.04 ex VAT per user.

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