Customer Reviews

Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Professional [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Adobe comes out and delivers another fine Acrobat product. While I purchased this for the sole purpose of creating PDFs and forms we could email our customers, have them fill out, save and email back, the brief touches I've had with the automatic form generators have left me impressed. The user interface is well thought out and clean which is a touchy subject for me personally as a programmer who specializes in UI design. Everything is movable, hide-able and customizable in a new sharp looking set of toolbars that should feel right at home in Windows Vista.

But, while it's a fine product that loads quickly thanks to a pre-loader when Windows starts, it does suffer from it's share of problems. The new user interface, while fancy, is glitchy, and has crashed out the software on more than one occasion. Simple innocuous tasks such as dragging a form element into alignment can suddenly leave you staring dumbfounded at your desktop as Windows defends itself from some index out of bounds fault. Is it entirely stable? No, but sadly, it's up to par with 99% of the industry's X.0 release software standards; which means it's 98% usable, but don't hand your boss an unpadded deadline that doesn't take into account a few crashes here and there.

Finally, yes, while the price of RAM continues to decrease, the memory (and hard disk) footprint of software continues to increase to obscene levels. Make sure your office equipment is on the more modern side because it'll take up 20meg+ of your RAM just when the computer starts; which is in this IT professional's opinion, a hefty price to pay just to look at PDFs in my web browser or on my hard drive without a 20 second load-up delay. Load it up and create a PDF of a simple Word 2003 document that contains only a page of text, and task manager tells you it's now eating up 50 meg. In short, it won't run well on the bargain-basement Intel Celeron, 256meg Windows XP machine.

As a final note for those who aren't heavily into IT looking to buy this product for their small office, you need to be connected to the internet when this is installed and be absolutely sure you install it on the computer it's going to permanently reside on. Like most expensive modern business software, Acrobat requires an activation in the name of Digital Rights Management that records it's serial number and the hardware ID of the computer it's installed on and keeps it on file at Adobe. One copy of the software will let you install it on exactly one machine. Try to install it on another machine (even if the original machine got obsoleted, kicked the bucket or transferred to different personnel), and you'll be met with a "this is already installed, please buy another copy" message. DRM forces forethought in these modern times.

Overall, it's excellent software, and for the faults I listed, I still give it 4 stars because it's an extremely solid product that'll work hard for you. Expect the crashing issues to clear up as Adobe silently releases 8.0.1 and onward as free patches that will be downloaded automatically thanks to Adobe's built-in upgrade manager. While executives balked at the idea of office personnel with 1 gig of RAM in a common desktops a year ago, in reality, that's the working minimum these days for your office's power users who may have eight things open and/or running at once. It's a $50 upgrade that to a power user, saves about 5 minutes of worktime on every hour of computer use. Do the math and get them the tools they need because software like this won't be getting less bloated anytime soon.

Finally, if all you're looking at is to create PDF files, there are many smaller, cheaper programs out there that can easily do the task. You might want to hit up Google and investigate further.

Software that repeatedly crashes and requires multiple reloadings deserves NO STARS, but amazon does not allow that option, so this gets 1 star.

Having owned versions 4, 5, 6 and now 8, I've watched this product add features, and with them glitches. Would it be a great product if it worked? Yes. Unfortunately, it crashes, and crashes and crashes.

Adobe has already issued two update fixes, but still it crashes.

Not good.

UPDATE: Since writing the above, I have purchased a new HP desktop and Acrobat generally works on it. The major exceptions are the actions listed under the Document tab, especially Reduce File Size, which simply crashes as soon as you click on it. For anyone who stores large files, this is a significant defect.

My old computer (a Gateway) was about five years old. Both computers run on Windows XP, so the operating system is not the cause of the crashes.

2nd UPDATE: Today [02/06/08] Adobe released Ver. 8.1.2. It's still screwed up.

3rd UPDATE 02/23/08: There is an alternative on the horizon, PDF Converter Professional 5.0 by Nuance Communications, which sells OmniPage 16 Professional. Nuance has an ugly history of selling software before its time (i.e., using early purchasers as beta sites), but it's the only real alternative I've been able to find. There are other shareware programs, but they don't have the functionality of Adobe Acrobat 8.

UPDATE #4 02/26/08: Well, it looks like PDF Converter Professional 5 also lacks the functionality of Adobe Acrobat 8. I went to Nuance's website and downloaded the new version, only to find that it lacks support for scanners. (This is strange because Nuance's flagship product, Omnipage, does include support for scanners.) It does, however, include features for inserting, extracting, replacing, deleting, cropping and rotating pages, which I had been having trouble with in Adobe. In its promotional materials, Nuance claims that it will create headers and footers, but I see no evidence of that.

UPDATE #5 07/28/08: This will be my final update, since Adobe has released Adobe Acrobat Professional 9. I bought a copy yesterday and have just begun using it. It seems not to suffer from the flaws that afflicted Acrobat 8, but we'll see.

The clear lesson of all of this is that Adobe releases poorly written and documented software, treating its customers as beta testers. Caveat Emptor.

Another bloated, greedy and unstable piece of software from Adobe. Software whos auto-update feature caused my entire software suite to crash as Adobe burrows into everything for Word and Outlook to Internet Exploiter and Explorer. Here's the kicker, the Adobe software won't let you uninstall or reinstall, generating a consistent error that is not documented on Adobes website. And if you even bother to try their customer support line, find a comfortable chair and make a drink, you're gonna need it.

Although this is a valuable product when it works. Beware, Adobe tech support told me that it NOT VISTA COMPATIBLE. We have personal experience of this. Additionally, as with all Adobe products their validation process often does not work. We have spent hours on the phone and come to heated tempers when trying to validate a legitimate Adobe product. Validation also stopped working after a few weeks and we had to repeat the process and encurr hours of loss time. We have also had Adobe updates crash the entire system which took day to fix with many incompetent tech support staff members.

I ran into errors displayed when trying to register the software. Wrote down the errors and called adobe, and adobe tells me to ignore the errors, the software is registered anyway. So far the product is working great for my required documentation project, but as usual with adobe products, the aftermarket need for additional manuals, training and tutorials is where the other 2/3 of the money is made. A product should have an in depth support and help system within the package you purchase. If the product has a feature, there should be an answer for all options in the product manual. I should not need to buy an aftermarket manual or visit an online support forum to find an answer to a question that should be in the product manual in the first place. I recommend the product in you need proprietary document formats or special document security for forms that the general public can access or needs to access. If you hope to get up and running in a hurry or need some help with the details, buy a little extra help, buy an aftermarket book on the product. The help information that comes with the product is frustrating for lack of necessary information, and sometimes the language to find the answers is frustrating itself. A little more intuitive menu help is all that is needed. If there is a name of an option or feature within the software, the same name should be in the help file index.

Update: By now (Feb. 2009 Acrobat works with MS Office 2007 products.
I don't know what upadate by what supplier fixed it.
Gio

I have a recently purchased Acrobat 8.0 Professional. It installed fine on my new Vista machine, although it cites only Office 2003 products. But I have MS Office 2007. After installation (and reinstallation) no Acrobat conversion options show on MS Word, and when trying to use Acrobat directly for an MS Word file conversion it first reinstalls itself, and then reports that the Word file (I have tried several) is corrupt.

I now have to ask colleagues with older software to do my PDF conversion.
I could not find out if or when Adobe plans to be compatible with Vista and Office 2007.

My initial installation of Adobe 8 failed on 32-bit Vista, though with the available patches it ultimately worked on Vista. We purchased new workstations with RAID 1 (mirrored hard drives) because of a catastrophic data loss last year.

However, to protect themselves from piracy, Adobe employed Macrovision to write their copy protection module. It will not allow Acrobat to run with mirrored drives (RAID 1). This is essentially undocumented. There were no error messages saying this product is not licensed for use on a RAID array equipped workstation. Worst of all their technical support did not know or would not say that RAID is not permitted. Rather they blamed our hardware, software, network, ...

All we saw was a locked up Adobe Acrobat 8 activation screen. After a week of working with Adobe technical support we finally proved that RAID 1 is not a permitted configuration. We, at Adobe's insistance, purchased an enterprise licensed version over and above the the retail version (not returnable). We changed out processors, motherboards and did major server (Group Policy) reconfiguration but did not fix the problem. We went through XP and Vista both 32 bit and 64 bit at Adobe's request.

Adobe really should just tell customers that RAID 1 is not permitted. Their technical support should know this and not waste a week of their customer's time trying everything else. Their blame the customer and debug in the field approach has me looking for alternatives.

Other than that it is a very good product.

I tried the Adobe Acrobat 8.01 professional trial version before purchasing the upgrade. In the process of installation it required a working version of Acrobat Professional 6.0 to be removed. The trial version did not work on an updated Windows XP environment. This led me to an on-the-road problem: no working version of Acrobat. I do not recommend this product until new versions are compatible with simulaneous presence of earlier versions and bugs in the present version are fixed.

I'm so glad that I installed a trial version of Acrobat 8 Professional prior to buying it. Luckily, I did not need to uninstall a working version of the product in order to install the trial version, unlike the previous reviewer. The program crashed at least a dozen times during my first hour of use, and I wasn't trying to do anything complicated. For example, the program simply disappeared without a trace when I pressed the Settings button during a Save as... dialog or attempted to Edit -> Preferences for HTML export.

Like many other reviewers, My version would not even load to the opening screen before an error code and system shutdown occurred. I downloaded 8.1.0 direct from Adobe and installed it on a professional workstation. An HP xw9300 with Windows Professional XP with all service packs and no viruses or spybots. I tried an hour with Adobe customer support but got nowhere. They outsource telephone support to India. I talked to two separate individuals that did not even know how to use their own computer. Don't even think of buying this product.