Ever wondered why Adobe Acrobat takes a long time to open? Apart from it being influenced by the speed of your computer, the main reason is because it has to load many plug-ins. In Acrobat these plug-ins are used for everything from annotations and markup, to applying security and touching up text.

If all you want to do is view or read a PDF file, then loading all these plug-ins when you open Acrobat can be a frustrating process. Fortunately there’s a way to bypass the loading of them.

Hold down the Shift key (on Win and Mac) and double-click the Acrobat program icon.

Acrobat should load quicker, only opening with the toolbars shown below for Acrobat 5 — will vary slightly for other versions.