Your first case, start to finish

This walkthrough takes about fifteen minutes: open a real business-school case, highlight it by category, add notes, and generate a report you can print or share. Everything is done with the mouse; each step also lists the keyboard shortcut for when you want to keep your hands on the keys.

What you need

• VS Code with the PDF Case Review extension installed. New to VS Code? Start with Set up your computer and come back here.
• A case PDF. We use Ferrari in 2025: Balancing Tradition and Innovation to Grow from the MIT Sloan Teaching Resources Library, which is free to download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, credit to the authors): search for "Ferrari in 2025 MIT Sloan" or browse https://mitsloan.mit.edu/teaching-resources-library. Any PDF works, including your own purchased cases.

Download the PDF into a folder and open that folder in VS Code (File > Open Folder...).

1. Open the case and find your way around

Click the PDF in the Explorer (the file list on the left). It opens in the PDF Case Review viewer. Three places on the screen matter from here on:

• The activity bar, the strip of icons on the far left. The pen icon is PDF Case Review; click it to show the Highlights view (every highlight and note, grouped by category) with the Note view below it. Keyboard: Ctrl+Alt+H focuses Highlights.
• The tab's title bar, the row of small icons at the top right of the PDF tab. Left to right: Generate Report, Summarize with AI, Add Document Note and Configure... (the gear). Hover over any of them to see its name.
• The viewer toolbar, inside the PDF itself along the top. Its right-hand group has a colored dot next to a Category for new highlights dropdown, then the Highlight pen button.

Ctrl is Cmd on macOS throughout.

2. Highlight by category

1. In the viewer toolbar, pick a category in the Category for new highlights dropdown. Start with Financial.
2. Drag across a passage to select it, for example Ferrari's shipment numbers.
3. Click the small Highlight button that pops up right at your selection. The passage takes the category's color and a row appears in the Highlights view.

Repeat with the brand-exclusivity strategy (Strategic implication) and anything you want to raise in class (Question). The pen button in the toolbar does the same as the pop-up, and its color swatches are named after your categories, so clicking a swatch is another way to switch.

Keyboard: select the text and press the category's number.

Category	Color	Keyboard
Fact	yellow	Ctrl+Alt+1
Financial	green	Ctrl+Alt+2
Strategic implication	blue	Ctrl+Alt+3
Concern	red	Ctrl+Alt+4
Question	pink	Ctrl+Alt+5

Ctrl+Alt+6 to 9 reach categories you add later (see Set up categories).

Picked the wrong category? Right-click the row in the Highlights view and choose Set Category, or press the number with nothing selected: it recolors the highlight selected in the view. The view's title bar has a button that regroups rows by page instead of by category, and a trash icon appears on each row when you hover.

3. Add notes

Click a row in the Highlights view. The PDF scrolls to the passage and the Note view shows the quote, its page and category, and a Markdown text box that saves as you type. Under the box, Reveal jumps back to the passage and Delete removes the highlight with its note. Keyboard: Ctrl+Alt+N opens the selected highlight's note.

For your overall take, click Add Document Note in the tab's title bar (the note icon), give it a title like Thesis, and write. Keyboard: Ctrl+Alt+D.

For a note on a whole page, such as "Exhibit 2 contradicts page 1", open the Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+P, type page note and run PDF Case Review: Add Page Note. The palette is the search box for every command in VS Code; anything without a button is reachable from there.

Save with Ctrl+S. Your highlights and notes are stored in <case>.pdf.review.json beside the PDF and, for unprotected PDFs, embedded into the file as real annotations. Publisher-protected PDFs are never modified; the sidecar holds everything.

4. Generate the report

Click Generate Report in the tab's title bar (the leftmost icon) and pick a format: Markdown, Word or PDF. Keyboard: Ctrl+Alt+R.

The report lands beside the case as <case>.review.md (or .docx / .pdf) and opens from the notification. It opens with a summary table per category, then every quote with its category, page citation and note in the order you took them, with your page and document notes in between. Word and Acrobat open the outputs directly.

Two related commands live in the Command Palette: Generate Report As... asks for the format every time, and Export Annotated PDF... writes a copy of the PDF with your highlights embedded. Settings under pdfCaseReview.report.* control the format, output folder and quote length; pdfCaseReview.report.organization adds grouped sections by category, by page, or both with a per-page appendix.

5. Optional: an AI executive summary

This is off by default and never required. If you want one, click Summarize with AI in the tab's title bar (the sparkle icon). The first time, it opens a picker for Claude Code, Codex or Manual; Manual puts the prompt on your clipboard for any chat, and Paste AI Summary in the Command Palette brings the answer back. The gear at the end of the row, Configure..., holds the same provider picker plus Add an AI Account... for a second login and Summary Length... for the word budget.

Before anything is sent, the extension asks whether the document may be fed into AI context on the signed-in account, names that account, and states exactly what goes out: your highlights, your notes and the document's extracted text (a setting narrows that to notes only), never the PDF file itself. (The very first time, a one-off notice about using AI features responsibly comes first; agree to it to enable AI features at all.)

Say yes and the prompt itself opens in an editor tab, with a notification reporting its size in words and tokens and a Send to Claude Code (or Send to Codex) button. Read it, edit it if you like, then press Send: whatever the tab contains is what goes out. The reply opens in a tab beside it and is saved with your notes, so the next report includes it; Show AI Summary in the Command Palette reopens it any time. In the report, AI text is set apart in grey italics with a legend. See Using Claude Code or Codex as a reviewer.

If the dialog names the wrong account (your personal login instead of the one licensed for the document), use its Wrong account? Show how to switch button; nothing is sent, and the short version is: run claude, type /logout, sign in with the right account, then retry. To keep a personal and a school login side by side so you never log out, see Use personal and school Claude accounts.

Where to go next

• Every shortcut in one place: Keybindings. Every button and command: Commands.
• Change the palette: Configure... > Apply Category Preset... or the pdfCaseReview.categories setting.
• Read the sidecar reference to see what is stored, or commit the sidecar to git and keep the PDF out.