Breaking for Lunch with Adobe Acrobat

Doing the lunch break with coworkers, especially when everyone’s engrossed in important projects, isn’t always as easy as phoning in an order. With each person on an independent timeline, collecting food choices for delivery can take longer than expected. Using Adobe Acrobat’s Send for Review function is a good way of speeding up the proccess of finding out what each coworker wants to eat and collecting those choice in one convenient PDF.

The lunch break, typically the longest break of an 8-hour work day, allows everyone a brief respite from the day-to-day churn of corporate life. Often lunch is a time to get out of the office, gather together with some friends or coworkers, and share a meal while detailing a previous night’s conquest or planning for the next outing. Organizing a lunch getaway can be as simple as turning to your coworkers, yelling out “Hey! Let’s get outta here and go for some pizza or something!”, then hopping off the chair to meet everyone at the elevators, determining who rides with whom on the way out to the parking lot. Sometimes the workload is such that no one can leave the building and, unless you’re fortunate enough to have an employer that provides food in the break room, you and your coworkers will have to find other ways to drown out the chorus of gurgling bellies come to ring in the lunch time hour.

Take-out and Delivery Come to the Rescue!

If you’re anything like me, you keep a file of take-out menus from various restaurants in the area which you’ve visited for lunch. I use this library to help decide where the next meal will be from; where my coworkers and I will break for an hour to clear the noggin and fill the tummy. Over the years, this food-filled file folder has grown into a note covered catalog of delicacies circled, numbered, initialed and ordered many times over.

Collecting orders from colleagues is often an exercise in hand-delivering one copy of a menu, waiting patiently while the food choices are weighed and selected, clarifying the order with the orderer, then moving on to the next person. Leaving a menu on its own to float from one person to the next can lead to having no menu at all in the end, especially if it finds a home underneath a pile of papers or gets prioritized to the end of a long project with a short deadline. Either option, though sometimes effective, will more often lead to wasted time and a longer wait for the lunch goodies to arrive.

Adobe Acrobat Saves Lunchtime!

With Adobe Acrobat’s Send for Review feature, it’s easy to collaborate on ordering lunch with your coworkers without having to leave your computer or pick-up a pen to deface another paper menu. Once a restaurant is agreed upon, distributing their menu and collecting orders is as easy as sending out an email. Keep in mind that Adobe Acrobat Standard and Professional are full-featured products, providing you with the ability to more than just create or view PDFs. Luckily, the Send for Review feature alters the PDF you send out so that even a user with just Acrobat Reader can add comments to the file, an ability they’re normally excluded from with the free viewer. Here’s how to do it:

1. Scan in each side, or panel, of the menu and save as PDFs. If the restaurant has their food choices online, print that to PDF from your browser.

2. Collect the scanned pages by inserting them into one of the existing PDFs or with the Create PDF From Multiple Files command, crop and/or rotate as needed, then save the menu as a single PDF.

Review PDFs via email or by posting to a web server

3. From the File Menu, select Send For Review>Send by Email for Review.

All open PDFs appear in the Specify drop-down menu

4. If you had your menu PDF open, or any other PDF open in Acrobat, you’ll be able to Choose it from the drop-down menu in the Send by Email for Review dialogue box. Otherwise, click Choose and navigate to your PDF.

In the Mac OSX environment, Acrobat can be linked to the Address Book

5. Click Next. If you haven’t already done so, Acrobat will request that you fill-in some identifying information. Once done, you’ll be asked to add email addresses for the people you want to invite to review the file, or, as in this case, the folks you want to order lunch with. Be sure to click the Customize Review Options button if any of your coworkers are using Acrobat Reader — you’ll be able to turn on Reader functionality here.

Type in a custom message to your Lunchmates

6. Clicking the Next button brings us to the Review Invitation message window. Acrobat pre-fills the message window with instructions on how to use the attached PDF for Review. Feel free to add to or replace these instructions with your own.

7. Once the Send Invitation button is clicked, Acrobat sends the PDF to your default email application. An email is generated with your message, the PDF attached, and the email addresses you entered previously in the To: field. Now all that’s left to do is Send the email and wait for replies.

Import all the incoming comments or view them individually

8. Upon receiving responses from your lunchers-in-arms, Acrobat will offer you the option to Merge Comments with your menu PDF. Select Yes to collect everyone’s order.

Adobe Acrobat gives you 4 different layouts to choose from when printing your Comment Summary

9. After collecting Comments, select Print with Comments Summary from the Comments menu, choose a layout, and click OK to print.

10. Call in the order and continue with your work while waiting for your meal to arrive.

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