Customer Reviews

Adobe Acrobat Professional 9 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

Adobe Acrobat 9.0 has been a source of frustration. Conflict between Adobe's PDF Maker add-in and Microsoft Office 2007 causes the Microsoft application to crash. Adobe's add-in is automatically disabled by Word, Excel, etc., so you can't make an Adobe PDF while using a Microsoft application. If you enable the add-in in Word (a tricky process in itself) and then try to create an Adobe PDF from a Word file, Word crashes. But now you can create a PDF from a Word file when you are in the Adobe application! Major heartburn! I wish I had stayed with Adobe Acrobat 5.0!

On Adobe's website there is a TechNote that will guide you through no less than FIVE solutions (three printed pages) to help you resolve the conflict between Acrobat 9.0 and Microsoft Office 2007. Buy Adobe Acrobat 9.0 only if you are prepared to do battle with the default settings in Microsoft Office 2007.

I'm that guy in the office that always downloads the betas, always been willing to take a risk to try out the newest software, so I've been through a litany of nightmares when it comes to new programs and their inherent bugs. That being said, I have to say that Acrobat Pro 9 has never given me one bit of trouble. I upgraded from 6 to 9 so I could take advantage of the LifeCycle Designer to design forms for my company. Installation went smooth, and it's never given me any trouble. I recently upgraded to Office 2007, and both programs continue to function perfectly, separately and jointly. I always hate to see other have problems with their software (there are just so many better ways to waste time), and everyone is certainly entitled to their own opinion, but I have give this one a thumbs up.

I am the IT and a small company. We upgraded to Version 9 two computers. Software is fine until you have a problem. Mother board crashed in one requiring replacement. Adobe will let you install Acrobat then it checks out configuration. Adobe nag Tells you software will shut down in 30 days. Checking FAQ you must deactivate software before installing on another computer and it must be the original computer. Called customer support sept 10th. On hold 92 minutes had to leave phone for work then called back and placed on hold for another 32 minutes still no support. On hold today 34 and counting. I will update this if I ever get adobe to answer customer support. Microsoft customer support had my fix for me on day after I email them.

I recently heard about and downloaded the free Foxit Reader 3.0 and PrimoPDF, to use instead of Acrobat Reader and Adobe Acrobat respectively.

Wow, wow, wow.

Those two freeware programs take up so much fewer system resources while performing 90% of the same functions, for FREE!

Reader 9.0 has especially become a bloated monster, and with it gone I noticed a substantial speed improvement in Firefox. Overall my Windows XP Professional system is now much more stable, and faster as well. It's almost as huge an improvement as I got when I removed all the Norton software, even.

I have to use acrobat professional for my job. I have been using version 8.1.2 for the last year. I decided to upgrade to 9.0 because I had to get a third license. Acrobat only let's you install each package on two computers. I bought a third computer and instead of activating and deactivating a license each time I switch computers I decided to buy an additional package. What ticks me off about 9.0 is that it cost more than I paid for 8.1.2, but it seems to be the same package. The menus look the same and the software does essentially the same. I have yet to see a difference in my day to day work. If you are a user who uses the main functions of the software only, then you might reconsider upgrading. The software does not add any functionality. That aside, $499 for the package is a stiff price and results more from Adobe's monopoly position for this kind of software than from the quality and functionality of the product.

The product is mediocre on a good day.

Support is non-existent. Call support, be on hold for 30 minutes, then 10 minutes of proving you are a real customer, then back on hold for 30 minutes and the line hangs up on you. So, if you are foolish, you start all over. I did not.

Pros: "looks nice"

Cons: Does not export pdf to other formats without a lot of errors ( ie Word docs, text, RTF etc)

Summary: I have version 5 and I like it better. I don't know why there are so many errors going from PDF to other formats. It makes it useless. I am glad I tried the 30 day trial and advise anyone to try it fully to see if it meets your needs. Sorry but for me, I'll stay with verion 5 and not upgrade.

This is the Windows Me of all Windows. If I have an alternative, I will absolutely not to spend $500 to buy this software. It is slow. It crashes all day long. It does not follow any kind of standard. The LiveCycle Designer is a joke! The entire product is like some high school kid wrote it in the garage.

The only thing that is good that I can think of is the built-in Javascript debugger.

Stay away from this product if you can.

I have had no problems with this software in installation, usage, or interoperability. I am an IT officer in the Marine Corps and we are using this on about 24 different PC's in our unit. As we originally were using Acrobat on computers in the States during the workup, it really comes out to about 45+ computers that I have put this software on at different times with no problems. We are using Windows XP Pro and have had both Office 2003 and 2007 installed on the computers utilizing Acrobat 9. The only problem I had was after the March 9.1 upgrade, it stopped creating PDF's from websites. A Google search and a few minutes later the problem was resolved (in Acrobat, go to Help and then click on Repair Acrobat installation, restart machine, and you are good to go.) I have not had to speak with their customer service so I cannot give a review of that. From the reviews, it was the customer service that pushed the people with the problems over the edge. I can't rightly comment.
Bottom line is, it does what I need it to without problems. I have also gotten quite good at creating fillable forms (from Word 2007 docs) and have used that function very often. I have also used the "distribute forms" function and it worked very well.
I give it four vice five stars due to the price.

Problems with Adobe Acrobat

The following relates signficant functional problems with Acrobat which I have encountered. These include:
1. interminable interruption by error popups that cannot be stopped,
2. alteration of my documents to unusable forms (OCR rotates some pages that should not be rotated),
3. inability to convert some hyperlinked Word documents to PDF,
4. alterations of document identifying metadata that I have entered into Acrobat dialog boxes,
5. difficulty in performing common bookeeping tasks globally (such as changing zoom size for all bookmarks),
6. program crashes (when using split screen and editing bookmarks),
7. inability to change default settings that persist (such as getting Adobe not to put my name on all comments and other markups),
8. intermittent crashes when attempting OCR,
9. messages that the Acrobat Organizer database is damaged that cannot be stopped,
10. Acrobat cannot read a document (text to speech) that it did the OCR on if the document has more than one page, and
11. poor accuracy OCR.

Acrobat automatic updates flashes uncontrollable popup windows on your screen as fast as you close them, under certain circumstances. This is extremely annoying in that it is difficult or impossible to turn off. You cannot turn automatic updates off in the only place that would make sense to look for stopping this feature, and you cannot turn it off without connecting to the internet to update first - Adobe requires you to interrupt whatever important work you are busy with to take care of this mundane housekeeping task at their convenience. You would expect to find the option to turn off automatic updates in the preferences section, but it is not there. Adobe's totally nonintuitive place to stick this is under the Help dropdown, at Check for Updates. You are then forced to connect to internet and update before getting to the option to turn off automatic updates. If you use a firewall to block Acrobat from connecting to internet, Acrobat continuously attempts to connect to the internet (I repeat - endlessly) with a new popup window immediately appearing every time you tell it not to connect. Acrobat should behave like most other software in the universe - ask your preference before doing something. When you are working under time deadlines, say for a grad school thesis or a journal article submission, you do not want software interrupting your work or slowing down your computer to connect to the internet to check for updates. The user should be able to turn such activities off instantly and easily and get back to their work and not be bothered again. The user should be able to use a software firewall to block all internet activity or any specific software by their choice and not have the software refuse accept their wishes and keep sprouting an infinite number of popup windows on the computer screen. This can be especially irritating, say while at a university library downloading research articles, at which time Acrobat automatic updates endlessly interrupts your work. After one or two unsuccessful attempts to connect to update, Acrobat should just plain stop. Software programmers should never leave such closed loops in their code - a user should always be able to opt out.

Adobe Acrobat OCR will rotate some pages with graphs to a totally useless sideways layout and does not provide any means to correct the wrong orientation. Acrobat OCR took a page (regular 8.5 x 11 inches) with a lot of print oriented in the usual horizontal layout, but with one graph with the vertical axis labeled with a single word oriented vertically. Acrobat OCR then rotated the page 90 degrees clockwise because of this single word, rather than leave the page oriented the proper way to read the other roughly 300 words. There was no way to change the page orientation back to the obvious correct layout, so you would have to choose between no OCR or wrong layout.

If you need to change the zoom level of multiple bookmarks in one easy operation, good luck finding the answer - especially from Adobe. Not being able to accomplish this can make it difficult changing to a paperless office. Say you receive a document with bookmarks, and the person who created that document happened to accept the default zoom level that presents the pages of those bookmarks at an unreadable zoom (like fitting the whole page on the screen). Try to get Acrobat to change the zoom of all the bookmarks globally to a readable level, and most users will likely set all the destinations to one location doing that. You can change them one by one. Or, you can learn Javascript, but the script that actually works to globally change the zoom level of all bookmarks is hard to find. You could also purchase some expensive pharmacy oriented software that will do this function. There actually is a way to accomplish this in Acrobat 8 and 9, but the method is difficult to uncover. This capability has been frequently requested by users, and should be better covered in the help file or user manual, or the process should be made more intuitive.

Adobe Acrobat failed to correctly convert a Word document with internal navigational hyperlinks - while a different PDF creator from another company worked with complete accuracy. The Word document was 100 pages long, contained a 3 page contents section with navigational Word hyperlinks to each chapter, and each page had hyperlinks back to the contents - an only mildly complicated structure. Most of the hyperlinks were missing or did not work in the PDF created by Acrobat, but all worked well in the PDF created by another software.

In the properties dialog box for a PDF document, Acrobat will alter what you enter in the author box. If you enter multiple authors, using commas and semi-colons, and type the last name first - all components of the usual type of bibliographic formatting required for listing authors, Acrobat changes your punctuation so the entry turns into nonsense. If you want the entry to remain as you did it, you must use quotes at both ends - good luck trying to find that info from Adobe, too. Why should the user be required to perform a work-around? Acrobat should leave what you entered exactly as you entered it.

After creating a PDF of images (200-400 pages to make a book), using the split screen viewing option while entering bookmarks for the chapters causes Acrobat to crash and lose all the work related to the bookmarks. Split screen could be useful in that you can have the table of contents open in the top and use the bottom window to go to the destination and create the bookmark, except that this crashes Acrobat. That can be 15-30 minutes of work evaporated in a split second. This type of crash occurs frequently. To avoid a loss of work, save your work after every bookmark change, especially before closing a split screen.

Acrobat crashes frequently when editing small 20-30 page documents, while simply deleting some pages and bookmarks.

Another annoyance is that Acrobat captures the user name from Windows sign-on and automatically enters this as a label in all comments and other markups. There is no option to change the name or simply not to add the name to comments. Well, you can change it temporarily, but when you exit Acrobat, the change is lost. Most of the time, I do not want my name plastered on every comment I make. If the PDF is for my own use, I don't need to see my name over and over on every comment I entered in a journal article while reading it. If I intend to provide the PDF to students, I again do not want my name associated with comments I provide (who knows where this PDF may go). Adobe should make identifying information placed on comments modifiable, optional, and persistent, according to the user's wishes - not Adobe's conception that these comments are always going to be used for group collaboration over a PDF and require personal identification of every comment.

Adobe crashes intermittently when attempting to do OCR on a scanned document, and says it cannot load the OCR module. It is not clear if any specific conditions cause this. Occasionally, closing Acrobat and reopening resolves the problem. Often, it has required repair (reinstallation) of the program, and even though the installation files were saved on the hard drive at the initial installation, the repair process takes 20-30 minutes. If you are in the middle of some important work and/or on a tight time schedule, this is quite an unwelcome delay.

Despite having the default settings at not having Adobe keep track of PDF documents, at some point a message comes up that the Acrobat Organizer database is damaged, and telling you to close your browser (which was not open). Once this error message appears, you can't get it to go away. Even deleting all the files in the Organizer doesn't work. You have to reinstall Acrobat, but the error message will eventually reappear. This has lasted through several versions of Acrobat, and is annoying.

If you ever use the reading (text to speech) feature in Acrobat, it will not work on a document that you scan in and do OCR on, if the document has more than one page. It just says "Warning, blank." If you create the pages individually, Acrobat can read each page. If you are going to use the text to speech feature, you certainly would expect Adobe to make sure it works on a multipage document that Acrobat itself has performed the OCR on.

Another disappointment is the poor accuracy with OCR. Acrobat's OCR makes many more errors per page, even with high resolution scans at 300 dpi and higher, compared to stand-alone OCR programs. And the errors are difficult to correct, if at all. The only thing the OCR is good for is to allow you to highlight text you want to mark.

A number of inconveniences slowing your work with Acrobat also exist. Such as being required to click the mouse button once for every line up (or down) you want to move a page when creating a multipage document. You can grab and slide a page up, but then you can move it only as far as the number of pages visible in the assembly window, requiring multiple steps for the move either way. You should be able to continuously move a page by holding a mouse button, or simultaneously pressing another key and holding a mouse button. Overlooking this potential timesaver for users requires office staff converting scanned longer paper documents to waste a great deal of time. Despite organizing a file pre-scanning, there are always a few pages out of order, or that need to be added later.

For me, the above problems render Adobe Acrobat more trouble than it's worth. Many of the problems involve basic functionality and should have been easy to fix with minimal programming. Adobe has added all sorts of fancy features like print preflight and conferencing that may be of use to a much smaller number of users, but has failed to provide basic features and stability that would be expected to be present or corrected in a document handling program that has been around for so long. These Acrobat problems interrupt and stop your work. The problems also include not being able to convert routine documents to PDF (Word), altering documents to unusable form (OCR rotated pages), changing the data you enter (properties - authors), lack of basic commonly needed features (modifying user name for comments, easy global zoom of bookmarks), error messages that cannot be stopped, and instability (software crashes with split screen and OCR) with loss of work. Acrobat's OCR is not at a reasonable standard and should be more easily correctable. And there are just plain inconveniences, too. For some problems, there are awkward work-arounds and for others, no fixes. Acrobat is far overpriced for this level of functionality. It doesn't work properly and conveniently, the company is unresponsive to user needs, and there are decent alternatives for various PDF purposes.