ExecutiveDesk

1. Getting started

Open a document

• Home → Open, or Ctrl+O
• Drag a PDF onto the welcome screen
• Double-click a PDF in File Explorer, or right-click it and choose Open with → ExecutiveDesk
• Pick a file from the recent list on the welcome screen

Opening a second file adds a tab. A single ExecutiveDesk window holds them all.

Your original file is never changed

Every edit is made to a private working copy. The file you opened stays exactly as it was until you choose Home → Save as and pick a destination. Most commands say “— Save As to persist” in the status bar to remind you.

Password-protected documents

If a PDF is protected, you are asked for the password when you open it. What you can do next depends on which password you give:

A badge in the toolbar shows which mode you are in. In Restricted mode the editing commands are unavailable, because ExecutiveDesk cannot modify a document it has not been permitted to decrypt.

2. Reading and navigating

• View → Single / Two page / Continuous — how pages are laid out.
• Page thumbnails run down the left; click one to jump to it.
• Zoom with Ctrl + mouse wheel, or the zoom controls in the status bar.
• Search — type in the status-bar box and press Enter. Use the arrows to step through matches; the count shows as “3 of 17”.
• Select text by dragging across the page. Double-click selects a word, and a Copy button appears over the selection.
• Sticky notes on a page show as markers — click one to read it.

Home → Print prints the whole document or a page range.

Keyboard shortcuts

3. Editing pages

Everything on the Page tab acts on the current page unless it says otherwise.

You can also drag a thumbnail up or down the rail to reorder pages. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y undo and redo, up to 30 steps.

4. Marking up a document

On the Edit tab:

• Annotate — highlight, underline, strike through, squiggly underline, rectangles, ellipses, lines, arrows, freehand pen, sticky notes, text boxes, callouts (a text box with a leader line) and a measure tool. Pick a colour, opacity and line width. Remove Last undoes the last mark and Clear drops them all; the eraser removes individual marks, including ones already saved on the page.
• Add text — place a text box, choose font, size, bold, italic and colour, and position it precisely by dragging or by typing exact coordinates.
• Edit page — draw shapes, lines, arrows and images onto the page.
• Watermark — diagonal text across every page.
• Page numbers and Bates — sequential numbering, with a prefix and fixed digit count for legal-style Bates stamps.
• Header / footer — six slots (left, centre, right; top and bottom) with tokens: {n} page number, {total} page count, {date} today’s date, {file} the document’s name.
• Background — a colour or an image behind the page content.
• Signature — Draw one with the mouse, or Upload image to use a scan of your own. Choose the width and which corner it sits in.
• Remove notes — strips every annotation from the document.

Marks are placed where you see them, including on rotated pages.

5. Forms

On the Form tab:

• Fill fields — lists every fillable field with its current value. Text fields take text; check boxes take Yes/On or Off; radio groups and drop-downs take the name of the option you want.
• Add fields — draw new text boxes, check boxes, radio groups, drop-downs, list boxes, buttons and signature fields onto a page. You can also attach formatting and calculation behaviour — note that those are Acrobat-only features; other viewers ignore them.
• Reset — clears every field.
• Export data / Import data — save field values to an .xfdf file and load them back, which is how you reuse one set of answers across copies of a form.

6. Converting

On the Convert tab:

• Low / Medium / High — compress the document by re-encoding its images. Higher settings shrink more and soften image detail; High also strips metadata. ExecutiveDesk never hands back a file larger than the original.
• Pages to images — export every page as PNG.
• Images to PDF — build a PDF from a set of images.
• Text to Word / Text (.txt) — extract the text. This is text only: layout, images and formatting are not reproduced.
• Make searchable — run OCR over a scanned document and produce a PDF whose text can be searched and copied. Progress shows in the status bar and can be cancelled.
• Copy page text — read the current page with OCR and copy it to the clipboard.

7. Protecting a document

On the Protect tab:

Encrypt

AES-256. Two passwords, with different jobs:

• the open password is needed to read the document at all;
• the owner password governs what a reader may do — print, copy, edit, annotate.

Document metadata (title, author) is encrypted along with the content.

Decrypt

Saves an unprotected copy. Needs the owner password.

Redact page

Draw over the areas to remove. The page is rasterised and the marked regions painted solid, so nothing survives underneath. The redacted page is no longer selectable text — that is the price of a redaction that cannot leak. Other pages are untouched.

Sanitize

Removes hidden JavaScript, embedded and attached files, auto-run actions, actions attached to links and form fields, and document metadata. Worth doing before sharing a file you did not create.

8. Organising

On the Organize tab:

• Merge — combine several PDFs, in the order you select them.
• Split — write every page to its own file in a folder you choose.
• Flatten — bake annotations and form values into the pages and convert each page to an image. The result cannot be edited and its text is no longer selectable or searchable. You are asked to confirm.
• Attach file / Attachments — carry any file inside the PDF, and extract attachments back out.
• Add bookmark / Bookmarks — name a place in the document and jump to it.
• Properties — view and edit title, author, subject, keywords and creator.

9. Working on many files at once

Batch → Batch processing applies one operation to a list of files: compress, watermark, page numbers, convert to images, or merge them all into one document. Choose the files, the operation and an output folder.

10. Free and Pro

ExecutiveDesk is free to use. Documents you save on the free tier carry a footer band across the bottom of every page, reading “Created with ExecutiveDesk”.

Pro is a one-time purchase from the Microsoft Store that removes it. Use Upgrade to Pro in the app, or search the Store. Your purchase is remembered, including when you start the app with no internet connection.

11. If something goes wrong

• Errors appear in the status bar in plain language. The technical detail is written to %LOCALAPPDATA%\ExecutiveDesk\logs\errors.log — attach that file to any bug report.
• Long operations show a progress bar with a Cancel button.
• Crash recovery. If ExecutiveDesk closes unexpectedly with unsaved changes, it offers to restore them next time you start. Password-protected documents are deliberately excluded: recovering them would mean writing an unprotected copy of your encrypted file to disk.
• “This PDF doesn’t contain any fillable form fields.” The document has no interactive form. To put text on a flat PDF use Edit → Add text.
• A file opens but asks for a password you don’t have? The document is protected. Without the owner password you can read and possibly print, but not edit.
• Search finds nothing in a scanned document. The page is an image with no text layer — run Make searchable first, then search.

12. What ExecutiveDesk does not do

Stated plainly, so you are not left hunting:

• Editing existing text or images. You can add text and objects on top of a page, but not retype a sentence that is already there.
• Office conversion. No Word / Excel / PowerPoint → PDF, and no high-fidelity PDF → Word. Text extraction is text only.
• Digital certificate signing. The signature tool places an image of a signature; it does not apply a cryptographic signature.
• PDF/A, PDF/X or PDF/UA conformance, preflight, or linearisation.
• Languages other than English for OCR.