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.

Adobe's PDF technology is extremely useful. However, navigating through some PDF files can become a little tedious. Enter the bookmark, a link which can be used to take the user to a specific page within the document, speeding up the process of navigating through the document.

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 standard feature of all versions of Acrobat including the free reader. To make it visible, the user clicks on the View menu, then on Navigation Panels then on Bookmarks. To use a bookmark, the user just clicks on it and is taken to the page with which the bookmark has been associated.

Hopefully, you will agree that bookmarks are worth created. Howver, they cannot be created with the free Reader version of Adobe Acrobat: you need to buy either Adobe Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Professional, the two non-free versions of Acrobat. Having said that, you also need these packages to be able to produce your PDF files anyway.

Once you have created the PDF, open it with Acrobat Standard or Professional and open the Bookmarks panel. Next, navigate to the first page that you want your audience to be able to find easily, choose New Bookmark from the Options menu in the top right of the Bookmarks panel and enter a name for the bookmark. Repeat this procedure to create as many bookmarks as you think useful.

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.)

Still too tedious? How about using a program that creates all your bookmarks for your automatically? AutoBookmark is a commercial utility that just does that. It looks at the headings and text formats used throughout the documents and then creates bookmarks based on the document structure.

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.

It should come as no surprise to you to learn that Adobe InDesign has a similar utility which creates bookmarks automatically. However, this time, the PDF feature is inherent in the program, so you don't need to buy a full version of Acrobat. Two other DTP packages also offer an equivalent PDF creation facility: InDesign's big rival QuarkXPress and the little-known but brilliant Serif PagePlus.

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.

And what about all the other stuff you can get bookmarks to do? Well, the first thing will be to remove the default action. Right-click the bookmark and then activate the Actions tab. Next, select the "Go to a page in this document" action that was created by default and click on the Delete button. Select a different action from the drop-down at the top of the screen and then click Add.

Adobe have realized that it is possible that your bookmarks will not be seen by people opening your PDF. Perhaps they don't open their Bookmarks panel or perhaps they don't even know what a bookmark is.

As part of the finalization process after creating your bookmarks, choose File - Properties then click on the Initial View tab. Set the initial view to Bookmarks panel and Page to ensure that bookmarks will always show when people open your document.