DEMO: Installing Acrobat Reader

What a PDF is

One of the things that we often install on our computers is called a PDF reader. There's something called a portable document file, or a PDF. These are files that can be found on the internet that we might want to have access to and be able to read, so it's one of the things that I install on my personal machines, as well as make sure that I install it on all the machines that I'm deploying out into a business.

A PDF, or portable document format, has been around for a long time. The problem is, when you have a Microsoft Word document, only those who have Microsoft Word can open it. Same thing if you have a certain application that's designed to edit a document — a lot of times other applications can't open it. So this was created so that you could download just a free application out there and then be able to view these PDF documents. They have text and they have pictures, and it's kind of an open document system that anybody could download these documents and view the documents. You didn't have to have a special program to do that, although we do have a program to do it, but it's freely accessible.

Acrobat Reader is a program that can read those PDF documents. They do have an Acrobat Pro which actually creates the documents, but other people can create the documents if you download a PDF printer, or a lot of Microsoft programs have a PDF creator in it, and so you can create these PDFs. But then anybody that wants to read this has to have a program to read it, such as Acrobat Reader, and it's a free program.

Installing from the store

One way that I can do this is I'm going to click on the start button here, go into the store, and I'm going to type in here, I'm going to look up Acrobat. Give it a second to catch up here. Acrobat, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and there it is right there. So this is one way that I can install this, and what will happen is it'll install in the background. It's really slick and easy, and so I could go about this way, which is a great way to do it.

Downloading the installer instead

However, what I'm doing is I'm going to set this up as being more scalable. What I want to do is actually download the executable, so I have it for future installs, because I could be installing this on a lot of different devices. So what I'm going to do is close that out, go to the web, download Adobe Acrobat Reader, and I'll click on that.

Once again, I'm going to bypass anything that is advertisements. I'm not going to go too far down, because it's probably legitimate of a site if it's too far down. So the first one is the one that I want. It's from Adobe itself, so this is great, free PDF viewer. I'm going to click on that, and this is where I'm going to download it from.

I'm going to download, and this is where I watch out: this is an add-on here, install McAfee Security Scan Plus. I don't want this at all, so I want to make sure that that's unchecked. They really want you to install this software — because maybe they're getting paid by McAfee, or perhaps it's one of their products, or whatever the case may be — they really want you to install this software here. So what I want to do is bypass that by unchecking it, and then click on download Acrobat. So now it's going to go through the process of downloading it, and now I have the executable that it can use for this time and any future times as well.

Running the installer

I'm going to double-click that to open it, to start this install process. I don't need this Chrome open at all anymore. Here's the user account control. I can show more details of that, and it's from Adobe itself, so that's great. I could look at the certificate if I wanted to take a look at the certificate at this point — I'm just doing it because it's interesting to me to see that thumbprint there — but I'm going to click on yes to do the install of it, and then process.

Our installation is complete, so I can click finish here and select the default app for PDFs. I want that to be Acrobat, so I'm going to set that as the default, and there we have it installed. So I'm going to close that out. In fact, what I'm going to do — number one, I don't like things on my desktop, I don't like a clean desktop — so I'm going to delete the shortcut on my desktop, and we'll just close that out.

Let's give it a test run. I'm going to click on Chrome here and open up Chrome, and I'm going to just go to one of my worksheets for my IP subnetting course, and here it is, it opens it up.