The PDF equivalent of the navigation pane is the bookmark pane, which holds links that act as interactive index tabs. Several resources make creating this pane's links easy.

Choose whether you want Word to create bookmarks from the document's headings or Word bookmarks. Headings will let you jump directly to a particular section in the document.

Creating bookmarks in a PDF file actually edits the file, so Adobe Reader can't do it. You need the full Acrobat. It can however create sticky notes, which are not edits.

Does anyone know for CERTAIN if the Adobe PDF iFilter will index the bookmarks in PDF files? Many of the PDF's we have are scans of very old documents that cannot be OCR'd, so book marks where ...