Too Many Acrobat Windows

Like Microsoft Word, Acrobat likes to cre­ate a new win­dow instance and taskbar entry for every doc­u­ment opened. This is no big deal while read­ing a sin­gle PDF, but if you typ­i­cal­ly have sev­er­al open, as I do, the accu­mu­la­tion of all those sep­a­rate taskbar but­tons can be annoy­ing and counter-productive. Afterall, taskbar space is lim­it­ed, and a pow­er user may have numer­ous appli­ca­tions vying for space; if doc­u­ments with­in those appli­ca­tions gen­er­ate their own taskbar but­tons, it leaves even less space.

If, also like me, you don’t want every PDF to cre­ate a new taskbar but­ton, you can revert Acrobat to stan­dard MDI (Multiple Document Interface) behavior.

Open the Acrobat pref­er­ences from Edit > Preferences. The last option on the General pane’s Miscellaneous sec­tion is “Show Documents in Taskbar (Takes Effect After Next Launch of Acrobat)”. Uncheck that and, after clos­ing and relaunch­ing Acrobat, only a sin­gle taskbar entry will ever appear regard­less of the num­ber of PDFs opened.

To nav­i­gate between opened PDFs when Acrobat is set to stan­dard MDI mode, use the Window menu, which lists all opened PDFs by their titles, or use the CTRL+F6 and SHIFT+CTRL+F6 key­board short­cuts to cycle between opened doc­u­ments for­ward and back­ward, respectively.