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I found out how easy it is to make polished PDFs with seriously limited design skills, using Adobe Acrobat’s new Stylize and Generate Report features
Earlier this month, Adobe Acrobat added two new features: Stylize and Generate Report.
Stylize lets you apply a preset template to your document, rapidly changing the overall look and feel and providing further customization options to get things on brand.
Meanwhile, Generate Report does exactly what it says on the tin, turning a dense or text-heavy document into an interactive report that can be easily digested by key audiences.
Both features are available to individual or team users who subscribe to the Acrobat Studio, AI Assistant Plus, or Acrobat Express plans. I took a look at how easy they are to use and how it all works.
Task one: jazzing up a plain text document
For the first test, I wanted to see how easy it would be to give a basic, plain text document a total visual overhaul. I took an existing article, saved it in PDF form and uploaded it into Acrobat so that the AI could start working its magic.
The aim was to turn the text into something polished and engaging. I also wanted to see if we could apply branding elements such as customized colors and logos, elevating the tool further for documents that will be presented externally.
Getting started is very simple: Adobe Acrobat’s edit menu now offers a ‘Stylize with Adobe Express’ option. Select it and you’ll see a range of templates pop up.
Simply choose the one that feels like the closest fit and leave Adobe to do the rest of the work. The process here takes seconds – you’ll barely have time to check LinkedIn or reply to an email before the formatted version is ready for review.
Adobe’s Stylize feature seems to be aimed at people who want to get to their end result very quickly, and with this in mind the design options and flexibility are more limited than some other Adobe products.
This isn’t a drawback so much as a case of finding the right tool for the right job. If you have more design skills and want to spend time fiddling with the look and feel of the document, an option like Adobe Express might suit your needs better.
However, for those of us whose skills are more limited, Stylize offers a near-instant opportunity to bring a document to life.
That being said, there are still some editing tools available to you once your text has been ‘stylized’. This includes the ability to replace fonts or change the color of text, as well as the option to add images – so you can import your logo if needed.
Task two: creating an interactive report
The other new feature to appear in Adobe Acrobat this month is ‘Generate Report’. Again, it aims at speeding up a time-consuming design task, and offering a more engaging format for your document.
Once you have your information ready, putting it into a report format can help you get your message across in a way that actually resonates with key audiences – be that a director in your company or an external client.
Like before, I wanted to test how easy it was to use and how polished the results were, with the key question being: can this tool create something that you’d be happy to share with an external audience?
Getting started was easy enough: open up the document in Acrobat as usual, and then navigate to the ‘Read’ panel. View as interactive report is one of the first options you’ll see on the left-hand side, promising ‘a clickable overview’ of your document. Selecting this option opens up the AI Assistant, feeding in the following prompt: “Make an interactive report from this document so I can understand it better.”
The report was ready in seconds and, more importantly, the AI Assistant did a great job of reformatting the information and making it far clearer to read and digest. The report includes an interactive ‘sections’ menu at the top, so it’s possible to get quickly to the most relevant part of the document.
The content from the original document is replicated faithfully, however formatting changes such as the addition of tables and call out boxes make it far easier to read.
As before, the edit button is there in case you want to play around with the wording or change small details like text styles. You also have the option to edit with AI – if there are substantial changes needed, you can talk to the AI Assistant and ask for adjustments. It also offers suggested prompts, such as simplifying the report for a beginner audience.
The final verdict
After taking both of these new features for a test-run, it’s easy to see how professionals could fit them into their workflow. You certainly don’t need to have any design skills to create a professional-looking PDF, and both tools take a lot of the fiddly work out of formatting a document.
In particular, the Generate Report feature offers a useful new approach for making your documents more accessible and easier to digest.
The biggest limitation is the lack of creative control, in particular when it comes to using Stylize. Because you’re only able to make use of the existing templates, you can’t necessarily replicate your brand’s look and feel – but depending on the use case, that doesn’t need to be a big issue, and it feels like a reasonable trade-off for the speed that’s on offer.
For someone without a design background, these tools cut time and offer a refreshingly straightforward approach.
They’re best viewed as two small additions to Adobe's wider functionality: the important thing is picking the best tool for the job at hand, whether that means a dedicated editing platform like Adobe Express, or the simplicity of Acrobat's AI Assistant.