Delivery advantages
Beyond the ability to create presentations using your favorite fonts, Acrobat offers numerous advantages while delivering your presentation.

• Full screen View. This hides Acrobat's menus and page numbers, as well as the Windows taskbar with the clock at the upper right. Select View, Full Screen or hold down the Control key while pressing L (i.e. using the Ctrl+L keyboard shortcut). To return to Acrobat's normal view) at the end of your presentation simply press the Escape key.
• Easy navigation. Press the right arrow key to move forward through your presentation one visual at a time. Press the left arrow key to move backwards through your presentation one visual at a time. Or you can also use the 6 and 3 keys on your numeric key pad or the Page Up and Page Down keys. The Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End keyboard shortcuts take you directly to the beginning and end of your presentation.
• Zooming. You can easily zoom-in and view a portion of a page at great magnification without the type breaking up. To Zoom In, Hold down the Control key while pressing the plus key (+).This can be repeated as often as necessary, permitting you to emphasize a particular cell in a spreadsheet or, in my case during one of my design seminars, the nameplate of a newsletter to emphasize letter spacing. To Zoom Out, hold down the Control key while pressing the minus or hyphen key (i.e. Ctrl+-) zooms out to show more of the page.
• Moving around a page. You can move the page around the screen by clicking the left mouse button and dragging the page. (Assuming that the page is larger than the screen or you have already zoomed in to view the page at greater magnification.
• Web samples. If you are presenting a seminar or workshop about web design, you can capture web sites directly into Acrobat and navigate through the web site using the site's navigation links. This offers you far more flexibility than static screen shots of web site pages and greater quality than pasting screen shots into a presentation program.

Security advantages
Adobe Acrobat offers several important advantages that safeguard your presentation.

• Freedom from font incompatibilities. There is no change that the fonts you need are not installed on the computer you'll be using, if you're forced to use a different computer or, even, a different computer platform (i.e. you created your presentation on a Macintosh but are forced to show it on a PC).
• Easy file backup. Everything associated with your presentation is included on one file which can be easily backed up onto the nearly-universally available Iomega Zip Disc.
• Safety Downloads. Since your presentation consists of a single file, you can place it on an unlinked page on your web site, so--in case your laptop gets stolen at an airport security checkpoint--you can download a copy of your presentation at your destination. (See below).

Assembling a composite presentation
Here's how to assemble a composite presentation using files created with several different software programs

1. Create presentation framework. Start by creating your presentation's framework, or skeleton, using a presentation program like PowerPoint. After creating and checking it, save it as a PowerPoint (or other program) file and print out a set of audience handouts for photocopying.
2. Distill. Next, use the Acrobat Distiller to create an Acrobat file. At the same time, print out audience handouts of your PowerPoint presentation. 
3. Prepare examples. Using other software programs, such as Word, Excel, PageMaker, create the examples you want to show in your presentation. Save the files and then use the Adobe Acrobat Distiller to create individual files for each example. Remember: you can scan directly into Acrobat as well as capture web sites directly off the Internet.
4. Save examples. Create a folder for the examples associated with your presentation, (i.e. " Web 2000 Relationship Marketing Examples." Save each example with a clearly identified filename, i.e. give your examples filenames that you can easily identify later on.
5. Reveal thumbnails area. Open the file containing your original PowerPoint (or other presentation program) file. Select Window, Show Thumbnails or press the F6 function key. This reveals a vertical row of numbered gray boxes along the left edge of the screen.
6. Create thumbnails. Right click in the left-hand thumbnails area and select Create all Thumbnails. Instead of blank boxes, you now see each of your presentation visuals at reduced size.
7. Select where you want to add your first example. To add a previously saved Acrobat example file to your presentation, select the thumbnail before the point where you want to insert the example. (You'll know it's selected when a black border appears around it.)
8. Select Insert Pages. Right click on the selected visual and select Insert Pages. When the Select File to Insert dialog box appears, select Browse and locate the folder containing the Acrobat example file you want to insert in your presentation. Double-click on the filename and, when the Insert File dialog box appears, click OK if you want to insert the file after the PowerPoint visual introducing the example you want to show.
9. Update thumbnails. The newly added page will first appear as a gray box. Right click it and select Create All Thumbnails. You can then see the example file in the context of the PowerPoint framework.
10. Adding additional examples. Use the vertical scroll bar to the right of the Thumbnails to locate each of the PowerPoint visuals that you want to illustrate with an example and repeat the above two steps to insert the Acrobat files containing the desired examples.

Repeat as often as necessary until all examples have been integrated into your master presentation Acrobat .PDF file.

Presenting with Acrobat
When you get to your presentation destination, simply hook your laptop up to the monitor or projection system and you're ready to roll.

1. Load Acrobat. Then File, Open the presentation from the File menu. Or, simply double-click on your presentation title to simultaneously load Acrobat and open the file.
2. Full Screen. Go to full screen mode by selecting Full Screen from the View menu, or use the Ctrl+L keyboard shortcut.
3. Presentation delivery. Navigate using the right and left arrow keys or use the Page Down or Page Up keys.

At the end of your presentation, press the Escape key to close the presentation and Exit Acrobat.

 Important hint
One of the most important things you can do to ensure a successful Acrobat presentation is to modify the default appearance of the Mouse Cursor. The "hand" should not be present unless you want it to be. To set up your presentation so the hand only appears for a few seconds after each new visual:

• First, select File, followed by Preferences and Full Screen.
• Then, when the Full Screen dialog box appears, click the third drop-down menu, Mouse Cursor and select Hidden After Delay.

When you return to your Full Screen presentation, each time you advance to a new visual, the hand appears for just a few seconds, then disappears. Click the left mouse button, however, and the hand will appear, allowing you to zoom in and/or move the page around on the screen.

Changing this default is important because, otherwise, the hand will always be visible on screen, creating a noticeable distraction.

Disadvantages
There are remarkably few disadvantages using Acrobat 4.0 as a presentation tool.

• Audience Handouts. One is that, at least so far, I have not discovered an easy way of preparing audience handouts that contain three PowerPoint visuals to the left and note-taking lines to the right.To me, this isn't that big a problem, however, because I prefer to only hand-out copies of my PowerPoint visuals and not include the examples. Printers that allow you to print more than one page on a single sheet of paper, of course, would permit you to include examples as well as the PowerPoint framework. although you would probably not be able to include page numbers and other header and footer informationthat PowerPoint permits you to include.
   
• Limited web features. Another disadvantage is that, although you can navigate off-line through a web site that you have captured using Acrobat, you can only go as many levels deep as you have specified. In addition, any Flash or Java effects disabled and Alt Tags do not appear.
• Editing. The primary disadvantage is that it is  difficult to go back and edit your PowerPoint visuals after you have created your basic presentation .PDF file. Always check, and double-check, your PowerPoint file before Distilling it. Although it is possible to delete and insert individual PowerPoint visuals, this involves several steps. Better to get it right the first time.

Safeguarding your presentation file from airport thieves
If you have a web site, there is a wonderful benefit to creating your presentation as a composite Acrobat file.

Here's how to protect yourself against a worse-case scenario, i.e. your laptop computer gets stolen at an airport security checkpoint.

1. Upload your presentation to your web site. Use an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to upload your Acrobat .PDF file to a special folder in your web site.
2. Create an unlinked page on your web site. This is a hidden page that you can only access by entering the entire URL into your browser.
3. Create a link. Place a link to the file on the unlinked page.

If the unthinkable happens and your laptop disappears (or malfunctions), simply borrow a laptop or another computer, connect it to Internet, and download a copy of your presentation by accessing the unlinked page and double-clicking the filename containing your presentation.

This opens Acrobat--assuming it's already installed--and downloads the file to your borrowed computer where you can save it and present it later offline.