PDF Portfolios – Group Your Different File Types Easily.

Managing multiple file types for a project or task can be tricky. Especially if you want to be able to open, read, edit, and format different documents independently of each other, access them from one location, and easily share them with others. The PDF Portfolio feature in Acrobat allows you to do this — you can easily group and organize different files in place.

Series of wooden blocks depicting different file formats including PDF, JPG, txt, html, m4, being assembled to go into a block with a folder icon behind held by a person's hand.

What you’ll learn.

Keep everything together but separate in PDF Portfolios.

The PDF Portfolio feature in Acrobat allows you to easily assemble and share files that have been created in different applications into one PDF storage container. Each file format is stored and saved individually and can be accessed, opened, read, edited, and formatted independently of the others within the PDF portfolio.

Illustration of five people hold a loft different pieces of a jigsaw that are separate, but will ultimately interlock together.

Include multiple file types in PDF Portfolios.

You can put a wide range of file types created in different applications into a PDF portfolio as individual files, within folders, and links to online web content. Files you can bring into a PDF Portfolio include text documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint Presentations, Email messages, CAD drawings, image files, and audio and movie clips.

Use PDF Portfolios for many purposes and professions.

PDF Portfolios are useful for just about any type of sector or industry, and individuals. If you’ve got a variety of document types that you want to be able to share and access easily and see and present in a visually appealing way that is also easy to navigate, PDF Portfolios are the way to go.


There are many sectors and industries that find PDF portfolios useful. Some of these include —

Lawyers and legal professionals can use PDF portfolios to keep track of anything related to a case or legal matter — correspondence threads, notes and records interviews and meetings, investigation reports, deposition documents, evidence and exhibits, briefs, transcripts, and so on.

Finance

Bankers, lending institutions, financial consultants and individuals can use PDF portfolios to keep track of communication and loan applications and approval documents.

Real Estate

Property and real estate professionals can use PDF portfolios to manage everything related to the sale of a property including the title, marketing materials, owners’ corporations, land use, information about the suburb, and local council documents for the property. Individuals buying property can use PDF portfolios to keep track of their house-hunting documentation and correspondence.

Project Management

Project management professionals in any sector juggle a lot of documents —proposals, plans, schedules, budgets, charts, reports, and more. PDF Portfolios keep these organized, accessible, and efficient.

Creative Professions

Architects, artists, actors — all types of professional creatives need to always show their A-game. The PDF Portfolio features can be used to collate and present individual examples of creative work accessible from one file.

Easily share and present PDF Portfolios

PDF Portfolios are an excellent way to store and present your work in a compelling and professional format. You can combine multiple pieces of your work in different formats into a single storage unit for easy navigation, access, and sharing. PDF Portfolios are searchable by terms and file names. Files can be sorted and categorized within your PDF portfolio. PDF portfolios can be kept locally on your device, emailed, and shared online. Individual files can be rearranged, edited, and printed. During in-person meetings, PDF portfolios allow for easy access to documents without the need to carry or bring any paperwork to the table.

Person sitting at a keyboard. Conceptual floating images above the keyboard depict file sharing, documents and folders, check boxes and security.

Save time and money with PDF Portfolios.

PDF Portfolios are a fantastic way to collate your documents professionally, without needing to print and/or bind a series of different documents. Individual documents can easily be updated.

Make your PDF Portfolios visually appealing.

A great PDF Portfolio should have a clear structure and be easy to navigate and find the combined collection of files within it. Proper organization helps you, your team, and/or prospective clients or customers go through your work quickly, easily, and efficiently.

You can customize to your heart’s content within PDF Portfolios with different views, themes, visual presentation styles, layouts, and backgrounds. Design and aesthetics are essential, even in a storage container!

Keep your PDF Portfolios secure.

There are a few options to choose from to keep the contents of PDF Portfolios secure. You can password-protect the entire PDF Portfolio and/or create a cover sheet to sign the parent file and add security to any individual PDFs with the portfolio. Certificate security and other security features such as digital signatures can also be used within PDF Portfolios.

ALT TEXT: Illustration of a file folder secured by a padlock.

Understand the two types of PDF Portfolios.

The term “PDF portfolio” is often used in two ways, and both are perfectly acceptable methods of combining and collating documents. However, there are differences. These depend on what you intend to use your files for, and whether you want individual documents to be able to be viewed and accessed individually.

The PDF portfolio feature is like a central repository of different document formats, while a PDF portfolio is also a term used for combining creative work into one PDF file.

The PDF Portfolio feature in Acrobat.

The PDF Portfolio feature in Acrobat is used to collate and combine files of different formats into one accessible location, but also keep each document independent of each other. This is the main topic of this article. Read more about the PDF Portfolio feature in the sections above.

PDF portfolios to display work.

First impressions do matter, and PDF portfolios can be also used to highlight work professionally in a way that really pops.

A PDF portfolio is also a term used by creatives and job seekers to create and combine diverse types of documents into one PDF file to highlight their products and/or services. PDF portfolios are often created by photographers, graphic designers, content creators, actors, artists, architects, musicians, fashion designers, craftspeople, events promotors, and more, to present their work engagingly and professionally in a format that is easy to share and navigate, but visually appealing and captures an audience’s attention.

As a creative professional, putting your work into a PDF portfolio format means examples of your work are easily seen by anyone with a PDF Reader — whoever may be considering you for a job, project, contract, or buying your products and services. PDFs are compressible so you can keep file sizes down when emailing, uploading and downloading.

Layout of a sample design portfolio using colour and text to promote work.

With this type of design portfolio, you convert documents to PDF format and combine them as one PDF file. Images, videos, text documents, jpg — whatever format your content is in, you can play with it in a PDF by merging, adding pages, rotating pages, rearranging pages, converting to PowerPoint, making them interactive, and more.

Creative PDF portfolios are a powerful tool and work well with products such as Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and other apps the Creative Cloud in allowing for a more vivid story of a compressed collection of your work, and potentially saving you from printing and carrying bulky physical documents during presentations and sharing multiple individual files.

Make use of PDF Portfolios to wrap everything up.

In essence, PDF Portfolios are a way of wrapping your various file types up. Whether you’re at the beginning or end of collating and organizing files of different types, PDF portfolios are a great way to keep everything in one place. You can keep the integrity of the original file formats but organize a bunch of individual documents in a way that is easy to see, access, edit and share what you want to.

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