Customer Reviews

Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0 Upgrade from Pro V5+ [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I use Adobe Acrobat Professional extensively both as an attorney and as a researcher/author. Because of the new features advertised which would enhance Acrobat storage of PowerPoint presentations, I bought it off the shelves at a local Staples office supply dealer. I am proficient at my own installations and expected no trouble on this. It acted like a virus. The program did not finish installing. Worse yet, it corrupted the underlying 7.0 installation and fixed that so the Windows Controller program could not install it. I had to hack through the registry to remove traces of it. Finally I got to a stage where it appeared to be going through the registry process again. Then I received the coup de grace -- a BAD SERIAL NUMBER MESSAGE. I checked carefully and it matched the serial number exactly as on the label sent by Adobe inside its factory package. I used MicroSoft OneNote to make a colored screen copy of this phenonema and marched the package back to Staples where they refunded my money. It's too bad about the 20 plus billable hours as a lawyer lost to this process. My experiences in calling Adobe in the past when I puzzled through a far lesser discourage me from wanting to talk to their technical support people (who too often know less than me given the increasingly apparent out-sourcing to people who read from a script and give us credit for knowing far less than we do). At any rate, I am now bitter. My 7.08 installation of Adobe worked great on my favorite computer where I had the bulk of my multimedia presentations which I hoped to reduce complete with sounds to the Adobe 8.0 format. I suspect that wrong serial numbers were slapped on the packages. I am deeply disappointed, even ANGRY at the inconvenience this has caused me. I took it home and tried it on my desktop there and it also would not complete the installation and ruined my chances of a clean uninstallation of 7.0. Deactivation of 7.0 could not take place either after installation of 8.0. I don't know what Adobe was thinking -- or if they were thinking. I have been a loyal customer of theirs for many years, but I'm thinking distinctly non-charitable thoughts about them this early morning. I hope they get their act together -- soon. They owe us all a quick fix and patch and they need DEEP REPENTANCE for the damage this did to Windows XP home installations which also appear to be corrupted in the process of installing this "upgrade" program which acts more like a computer worm or virus than a program.

After 25 years of building PC, and installing software, beta testing software, I am unable, even with Adobe's technical support staff to install Acrobat Version 8. Software gets to the end of the install process and stalls. No combination of repair, uninstall, reinstall, registry cleaning, advice from THREE technical support staff after hours on the telephone can solve the problem. Using XP, with all the latest upgrades, defragging the drives, with 2 MB RAM, and a Adobe Tech support clean registry still fails to properly install the software.

I purchased this upgrade from Pro V7 which started acting quirky and unstable. The Adobe user interface continues to be non-Windows conforming and requires a little study before 'getting it.' I spent a lot of time initially customizing the toolbars to put back the same features I commonly used in version 7. The status bar at the bottom of the window with navigation controls no longer exists and I had to customize the toolbar to show those buttons as well. The overall interface is cleaner and the toolbars are more configurable than before.

As with many office applications I expect to be using only 50% or less of the possible features offered in this package. I chose Pro instead of Standard mainly for the forms features which I've used previously. This version does a better job converting and merging multiple documents into a single PDF. It offers a feature to bind together various documents besides PDF format into a single file, much like discarded MS Office Binder of long ago.

I am very leery of installing Adobe products (I have two others) because my experience is that something usually goes wrong. This upgrade installation went well enough but it didn't pick up my default Acrobat settings from version 7. A recent auto update failed to install properly but finally worked itself after several re-boots. When this update finally completed a request to register the product appeared (of course long ago registered when originally instealled). As I said - quirky installations.

have been using acrobat since v3,v4,v6. v8 is in line. seems a bit faster, smoother etc. have tried imitations on other machines. from a purely subjective view, acrobat is best. a bit pricey, but the best. with the usual caveats, can be installed on a desktop and a notebook, but requires a call to tech support which was quick and smooth.

After reading the reviews on installation problems, I was a little nervous about installing this software. The installation could have been smoother, but it installed alright. Although it did detect my older version (Standard V6), and advised me to uninstall the old version prior to installing the newer one; when it came to verifying if I had a qualifying product the installation program could not detect that I had V6. Now it was requiring that I type in the serial number of the older version. Because of that I spent about 4 hours looking for the older software and software case that had the serial number for V6. After typing in the serial number of V6, the software installation continued without a problem.

I like this software, and it is much faster then V6, though I haven't checked out all the features. I'm still evaluating this product. One thing I like about the Pro version is the built in OCR. It's not the greatest recognition software, but if your scanned document has standard type it does a good job converting. It does not perform well if the document contains fancy fonts; especially script fonts.

This is a major upgrade from previous versions . . . much easier to use and a much cleaner format.

I upgraded from Acrobat Pro 6 to Pro 8 and have been pleased with some of the new features the Pro 8 version has. I haven't reviewed all of those features but the one I like very much so far is the "typewriter" feature. It's very convenient when I download a form from some other source and can just start typing in it. I'm sure I'll have many more surprises in store when I start converting Word docs also.

I recently upgraded from version 6 and so far am very happy with this product. I originally downloaded version 9 from Adobe's web site, but didn't realize until I tried to install it that it doesn't work with Windows 2000. After some wrangling I got them to give me my money back, then bought the upgrade CD through Amazon. This is the first major piece of software I've encountered that won't work with Windows 2000.

First - Kudos [...]!

I've been a long time user of Adobe Acrobat products - back to the original version. I've upgraded periodically, but had stopped at Ver. 5 and 6.

Version 8 finally had enough feature and interface upgrades to warrant me popping for the upgrade. I was VERY PLEASE with the new look and all the *new* features that I had been missing.

Along with the new product came some downloadable or viewable tutorials which eased the pain of getting into all of the new features.

ONE ISSUE! Within a week or two of buying 8.0 Professional - I was on the Adobe website and saw that Ver. 9 was already announced/released. Bummer!

I was able to contact Adobe and qualified for the FREE update - but I wish that there had been some notification or automatic offer to upgrade the product at the time that I purchased it OR when it was registered.

HIGHLY RECOMMEND this product . . .but at this point . . .Go with Ver. 9!

Something about the fonts....if a font isn't installed on your computer you can't properly edit?? I don't understand but will say this. I feel many improvements were made over earlier versions. I love the text attribute toolbar so you can change font size, color, alignment, etc. Look forward to learning more as I use it more.