The countdown to going back to school begins on September 1. Whether this will be the first course in which you begin to study with a computer instead of the traditional, outdated and heavy textbooks or if you have been doing it for years, surely the files in PDF format are something more than usual in your routine.
This format has become a computing standard due to the great versatility it offers and is currently natively compatible with any operating system, without the need to install third-party applications.
Although it is true that textbooks offer a series of advantages that we are not going to find in PDF files, with the right tools, we can work with this format in a very similar way and perform even more functions.
If you want to get the most out of files in PDF format, here are 5 tricks that will help you in your daily routine interacting with this file format.
- Annotate. One of the advantages of this file format is that it allows us to add annotations very quickly, easily and cleanly anywhere in the document. In addition, we also have the possibility to print them together with the text if necessary. In this way, it will not be necessary to use a third-party application that we must have open in the background on our computer to consult the content to which it refers.
- highlight text. When we need to make a summary or outline of a topic, the first thing we must do is establish which are the most important points. Performing this function on a PDF file is much easier than it might initially be. In addition, we can choose different colors to highlight the text, which allows us to create a structure to follow when creating the corresponding scheme. Best of all, is that, once we have finished, we can eliminate the highlighted areas of the text, something that we cannot do with physical books.
- copy any text. One of the most important advantages that this format offers us is that it allows us to copy the text and paste it into any document, a function that allows us to make summaries and diagrams much faster and having to type the texts.
- Search for words. The fastest way to access the content we are looking for using the PDF format is by using the search function. Thanks to this function, we can quickly access the subject we are studying or search for specific content in the entire document without wasting a lot of time reading the content page by page as in books in paper format.
- Convert a PDF file to an audiobook. If sitting in front of the computer to read a topic is difficult for us, we can use any application compatible with this format to listen to the text instead of reading it. We can also use any of the different applications available on the market to convert PDF files to speech.
All the functions that we have mentioned above to get the most out of the PDF format are available in most of the applications that are compatible with this format, the best options being both edgethe default browser for Windows 10 and Windows 11 as the free app Adobe Acrobat Reader.