yes, more customization would be VERY welcome. It's true that Acrobat is has fallen behind....

Aubse? Nazis?? Wow.

I see we've reached the "abusive trolling" stage of the discussion. I believe that the next stage is for someone either to start using swear words or to liken Adobe to the Nazi regime of the 1930s.

AnonX - let's keep it to a productive discussion shall we?

Acrobat is a major tool for some very very different operations, and we the users need to explain our problems to Adobe, not to start telling people they should "be ashamed" when they are trying to help.

+1 to the previous commenter. I'm considering not renewing my license.

Anyone who comes here pitching the puny Quick Tools or custom tools in Acrobat should read below and be ashamed.

I just spent a couple of hours trying out the alternate applications mentioned below - Bluebeam Revu and PDF-Xchange Pro. I've been using Acrobat for as long as I can remember, and I’ve always thought it’s the best tool out there. Since Adobe is the company that developed the pdf format, they MUST be ahead of everyone else, right? Boy, was I wrong!

Below is a screenshot of the Bluebeam Revu user interface. It’s snapped to half screen, which is how I usually view documents.

https://postimg.cc/image/fppb5be0z/
When I saw that UI, I got flashbacks of old versions of Photoshop and Illustrator that I remember using many years ago. I’m talking about the very first CS versions, more than a decade old, that had those free-floating dockable panels that you could place anywhere around the work area. In Revu, everything that’s a button or a toolbar can be hidden, rearranged, or moved some place else. Toolbars can be free-floating or docked anywhere around the document area, i.e. top, bottom, left, right, or inside the pdf area. Each toolbar can be individually customized to show the buttons that you need, and you can create additional custom toolbars. That’s not all - you can store multiple UI configurations in ‘profiles’, so that you can easily switch between the custom configurations with just a few clicks!
The UI feels ‘tactile’ and responsive. As you move the mouse cursor over the panels, it clearly indicates which button is currently highlighted, while in Acrobat I often click on large empty spaces between buttons and nothing happens.
Overall the Revu UI looks and feels very professional, and is clearly designed for efficiency. I’ve seen similar UI’s in various Adobe programs over the years, but unfortunately Acrobat is not one of them. It’s a little pathetic to be honest. I don’t want this to sound like an ad for another software. I’m a long-time Acrobat user, and this is my honest reaction to discovering the ‘possibilities’ out there, and I hope it will give the Acrobat team something to think about.

Here is a screenshot of the PDF-Xchange which has a standard ribbon-style UI.

https://postimg.cc/image/qiwb71jwz/
The toolbars cannot be undocked like in Bluebeam, but they are completely customizable just like the M$ Office ribbon, and so is the navigation bar on the bottom. It’s still a big improvement over the Acrobat DC user interface.

A cheaper alternative to Bluebeam is PDF-Xchange. Most of the same features (minus live, multi-user collaboration) for $50 one time. Bonus: lightweight and fast, even with hundreds of 30"x42" pages.

I am guessing that the large "everything" is in response to those that are vision impaired. Which is fine. It just needs to be flexible to make it smaller for the rest of the population. Architects pretty much have gone to BlueBeam.

WOW Thank you to the previous poster!!! I had never heard of BlueBeam. It looks AMAZING! All those dockable and movable toolbars.... Downloading the trial now.

Dang...

Adobe needs to figure out that most people hate DC's interface, then switch things back before everyone departs and goes to BlueBeam.

I seriously couldn't care less about their logic for having a ****** user interface. Whatever the logic, one thing is for sure - it's bad logic.

When I snap my acrobat to half screen on a 1080p screen, literally half of the toolbar is taken by HOME, TOOLS, DOCUMENT, FEEDBACK, HELP, SIGH IN. Of those, I only occasionally click on Tools, and that's it. Everything else sitting there is a total waste of space. And what good is a customizeable Quick Tools bar, if it can only be placed all the way to the right of everything else, e.g. File tools, Edit tools, Page Navigation tools, Page display tools, etc. I want to be able to re-arrange all of the above, any way I want.

M$ got it right with customizeable ribbons (at least better than this).

Drag and drop tools? I think YOU are crazy to think that Adobe would ever implement something so useful. We can only dream of something so user-friendly in Acrobat.

How will it help for Adobe's Acrobat team to tell users what their "logic" was for creating the DC user interface? It was terrible in 2015 and it is still terrible in 2018. It would be more helpful to know whether or not they've been working on a new, improved version of Acrobat all this time and when we can expect it to be released if they were.

Adobe is well aware of how much people dislike the DC interface. It’s very polarizing. It would be helpful if they would simply explain to their users the logic behind the DC interface: with regard to the giant buttons and what seem to be oceans of wasted space. I know they didn’t do it randomly, but to most desktop users, it seems like it was designed by people who aren’t even Acrobat users. Acrobat people: can you chime in and tell people to logic behind the DC user interface?

I agree 100%
Everyone dislikes the current configuration. What's the hold up? Get it fixed Adobe!

I stumbled across this page when trying to find out how I can export my Quick Access Toolbar. I see that all these ideas have been under review since Sept 4 2017--it's now Aug 2018 and the tools and toolbars are still clunky and Unfriendly for users. Please make a change!! And make it possible to export the Quick Access Toolbar since that is much easier to use than a custom Tools pane!!

Kelly Vaughn, it seems like you just read the title of this thread and not much else. With due respect to the effort you put in explaining how to use the Quick Tools, if you actually read the comments you will realize that most users here are well aware of its existence, and the issues described here go a little deeper than figuring out how to right click on the toolbar to select "quick tools". QT is the single tiny portion of the UI that's somewhat customizeable, but extremely limited. In fact, if you enable the other toolbars e.g. File, Edit, Navigation tools, etc., then the Quick Tools portion of the toolbar is pushed so far to the right that it becomes unusable. You can't even rearrange these separate toolbars, e.g. if you wanted to have the Quick Tools all the way to the left.

The larger point you are missing is that a lot of the UI space is wasted, especially the non-customizeable parts. The entire UI needs to have a ribbon-like interface with smaller buttons, less empty space around and between, and it needs to be more tactile and responsive, like in so many other productivity apps. In fact, if the UI was well done, like in those other softwares, it wouldn't need to be very customizeable, because everything the user needs would be available and accessible. And if panels can be docked/undocked, it would be even better.

Hello Kelly, I have edited that tool bar. But that tool bar only shows up when you have a pdf open. Normally if I want to scan a new document that tool bar is hidden. Now it may be faster to open a existing pdf to see that tool bar then create a new document from there. At least faster then opening Acrobat and scanning from the start screen. Or they could just let us enable/view the customized section of that bar all the time!

This is such a hot-button issue (3 of the top 4 feature requests deal with toolbars), that I decided to make another video to help the users. There actually are several ways to customize your toolbars. They are buried under "Customize Quick Tools", they Show/Hide menu, and "Create Custom Tool."

I think a big reason for the major confusion on the part of the users is that Adobe didn't use standard nomenclature. There are about 5 different areas of the UI that are called "tools." In my opinion, "Create Custom Tool" should rather be called "Create Custom Toolbar Configuration."

This first video deals with how to show and hide different areas of the toolbar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpG3kDvmTJ4&t=30s

And this video shows how to create a "Custom Tool" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMkaxy1Pi88&t=3s

Absolutely! Full customization of toolbars please!

I can strongly support this request. As a professional prepress operator I use Acrobat Pro all day long. Unfortunately I am forced to stick with version 10/11 because the UI/menu of DC is so ******. People do not use Acrobat Pro on tablets! Please lay off your UX/UI designer and revert to the previous UI/menu system. It is well proven and very functional. And don't even think of spoiling InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator too.