In Acrobat 11 portfolio does not open to first document in file.

Question

When opening portfolio it opens with focus on second to last document in portfolio not the first.  I've reorder and saved, reordered and saved to new file with no change any other change is saved. How does acrobat decide which file to display when it opens the portfolio?

Answer 1

This problem has plagued our use of PDF Portfolios for years.
No matter what you do with an existing Portfolio, the Portfolio insists on opening to the file with the name which sorts first alphabetically. Setting the Order fields correctly does not change this behavior.
There are only two ways I can ever get a PDF Portfolio to open to the first document in the collection:
Name the individual files so that they sort as desired by their alphanumeric names. Obviously, this is a crude workaround.
Build the Portfolio from scratch using the Combine Multiple PDFs... dialog. That dialog lets you arrange the various PDFs using the Move Up and Move Down buttons. The problem with this is, that dialog is not available when working in an existing Portfolio. If you add and/or delete files to the existing Portfolio and save it, it will always open to the file with the name which sorts first alphabetically, despite the files being numbered and ordered correctly by the Order field (or any other field you create an tell it to sort by). The files do sort according to the specified field, but the Portfolio refuses to open to the first file in the sort order. It insists on opening to the file which would be first if they were sorted alphabetically by filename.
Here's the recurring problem: I have to re-publish new versions of multiple Portfolios every year. It takes much tedium and time to setup a Portfolio from scratch. For example, including the needed image and text boxes in the Header has to be re-done; there (stupidly) is no provision for copying those objects from an existing Portfolio into a new one. So one expects to be able to simply open an existing Portfolio, delete its documents, import new documents, and save it. But whenever I do this, the Portfolio reverts to opening to whichever document would be first if sorted alphabetically by filename. This happens no matter how I add the new documents. If I add them one at a time, the Order field gets set correctly. But that has no bearing on the unwanted behavior of displaying first some document other than the first one in the collection.
So every year, I end up searching this forum looking for a fix, finding none, and resorting to awkward meaningless prefixes (01_, 02_, etc) on the file names. Very inelegant to the recipients.
JET