Acrobat Portfolio Search for the Same Phrase Across Multiple Documents

Recently I had to review a document with quotations from boilerplate contracts for 17 distinct but related transactions. It was necessary to confirm that dozens of quotations from the cited documents were all in fact the same in the agreement used for each transaction. Searching for the term again and again in the PDF of each transaction's contract was very time consuming. I made the process go faster by using Adobe Acrobat's portfolio feature.

In Adobe Acrobat XI follow these steps:

1. Go to File . . . Create PDF Portfolio.

2. Click 'Add Files' and Acrobat will assemble a group of PDFs into one group that you can run searches in.

3. Type or paste a phrase in the search box.

4. A list will be generated which inlcudes each PDF in the set which contains the search term and the number of times it appears in the document. If one of the documents in your set is omitted, you know you need to review it to see how the language was altered.

5. Click the arrow next to each document in the list and you will see a list of excerpts from the document in whith the search term appears. [You can scroll through these hits by clicking on the arrow to the upper right of the yellow box for the document - circled in red in the screen grab below.]

6. If you double-click on the excerpted language in the yellow box you will jump into the PDF on the page where the hit for the search term appears.

7. Before running another search close out of any documents that you open from the list window, or the search will only run on the open document.