help with skim

Hi; After experiencing untold frustrations with preview, I finally downloaded skim only to discover another brick wall. Am I missing something? When I set all pdf documents to open using skim, I get confronted with a couple of tables, and some options but no document. There is a text content where I can go from the start to finish but I can't read the individual lines in the text. A sighted person advised me that it is a solid block of text. What do I have to do to set up skim to read documents. I could at least get preview to read the same document. Can someone help me and give me an overview of how to set up skim? Thanks.