Office applications Toolkit

Acrobat 7.0 Professional review

7.7

Editors' Rating

Setup & interface		8.0
Service & support		7.0
Features		8.0

Daniel Drew Turner CNET

Published: 16 Nov 2004

With the file formatting in Acrobat 7.0 Professional, your carefully written, thoughtfully presented and beautifully illustrated presentation will come across in a Portable Document Format (PDF) file just as you intended it, no matter who reads it on what platform. And although some other software utilities now allow you to save or convert PDF documents, and even let you do basic PDF work, Adobe's Acrobat line of products remains the premier option, with the latest productivity enhancements. The latest version adds new collaboration tools, organisation and other office-related features, but at a price -- system performance. Those with top-end PCs or Macs should have no trouble, but everyone else will notice a performance decrease with all the new bells and whistles within the Professional edition. Also available is the Standard version, which costs £150 (ex. VAT) less and sacrifices a few of the most workgroup-critical features, but still provides the most essential functionality without as much of a performance hit.

Setup & interface

Acrobat 7.0 Professional is available for Windows 2000 and XP and Mac OS X. For Windows, you simply download or start the installation from the CD. To get up and running with a Mac, you drag the Acrobat 7.0 Professional folder (again, either as a download or from a CD), which contains Acrobat 7.0, Acrobat Distiller and an uninstaller, to your Applications folder -- no wizards or complex installation decisions required. The program comprises more than half a gigabyte, however, so copying the files can take a while on a computer with a slow hard drive.

Although Adobe claims that Acrobat 7.0 users will see a 30 to 80 percent performance boost over last year's version in most tasks, launching Acrobat 7.0 on an older (G3-based) Mac proved to be a long process. In our experience, launching Acrobat 7.0 takes longer than Acrobat 6.0, and once it's open, navigating between Open and Save dialogues from within Acrobat incurs a noticeable lag.

The interface is unchanged from version 6.0, with the exception of new toolbar buttons for Commenting and Markup, Send for Review, Security, Signature and the single-button Create PDF option. There are also new tabs along the left side of the document window that allow you to access reader comments and file attachments.

Features

Acrobat 7.0 Professional introduces a host of good new features. Adobe also claims that newly generated PDF files result in smaller file sizes than with previous versions of Acrobat, which is true, allowing you to email or post larger documents than you could before.

Tight integration with Microsoft Office 2003 allows you to convert most Word, PowerPoint and Excel files within the applications themselves to PDFs. Acrobat 7.0 can also make PDFs of captured Web pages -- but only in the Windows version. Mac users also miss out on the Windows version's capability to convert Outlook email and Publisher, Visio, Access and Project files, although this is because there are no Mac versions of those products. However, both versions support PDF conversion for AutoCAD projects, complete with the ability to embed 3D objects.

Acrobat 7.0 Professional also gains security features, including custom password protection for PDF files, a thumbnail-based organiser, new commenting tools such as virtual sticky notes, and the ability for users of the free Acrobat Reader 7.0 to review documents and add their own comments. Collected reader comments then appear in their own PDF document, which you can search and index later -- handy for office collaboration on team projects.

Unfortunately, all of these features make Acrobat 7.0 RAM-hungry, which can bog down older systems with limited amounts of memory.

Service & support

Adobe offers a wide range of free support options for Acrobat 7.0 Professional on the company's Web site, including user forums, which often feature 'expert guest hosts' who pop in with answers, as well as links to user groups and FAQs. The various site options are fairly easy to navigate, as they are organised around product lines as well as specific issues or design topics.

Phone technical support is a roll of the dice, however; it might just be a free tech-support call, but you won't know until after you've placed the call. Installation and product-defect support is always free, but other problems may or may not carry a fee. When you call Adobe's technical support, you'll be asked for a credit card number first, and a support technician will determine whether your issue qualifies for free support after he or she listens to your complaint. If Adobe decides to charge you, the support person will ask whether you want to continue and quote you the expected costs associated with your call.