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Hide Acrobat Reader Tool bar in Mac/Windows

Side bar(Tool bar) that appears with Adobe Acrobat Reader with options like Export PDF, Create PDF, Edit PDF, etc, is frustrating sometimes as you don’t find a way to close/minimise it. When reading any PDF files, it is taking at least 30% of the screen space.

Acrobat Reader RC disable Tool pane

There is an option to disable this tools pane but it is not working as expected. If you want you can try it as well by following the below instructions.

  1. Go to Edit > Preferences (or press Ctrl+K in Windows and Command+K in Mac)
  2. Go inside “Documents” section
  3. uncheck “Open tools pane for each document”.

There are some forums which are advising to edit a XML file to get rid of this tool bar pane, but for a normal user they are little complex.

One quick and easy way that I came across is a key combination. See below based on your operating system.

Windows : SHIFT + F4

MAC : SHIFT+Fn+F4

Pressing above key combination toggles the tool bar pane in acrobat reader. So you can easily enable or disable as you need.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Ken February 9, 2017, 8:25 am

    Thank you for the hint about where to look for within Preferences. For the Adobe Reader 2015 release on my Mac, there is an option called “Remember current state of Tools Pane”, which is unchecked by default. Checking it and then hiding the Tool pane allowed it to persist thereafter! 🙂

  • Aileen May 4, 2022, 2:38 am

    This is BS. This process MINIMIZES the toolbar. It does NOT REMOVE the toolbar. MINIMIZE is not REMOVE. The words are not the same. The words have meaning. Remove. The. Toolbar. I want the stupid thing GONE.