Customer Reviews

Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional Upgrade from Professional Version 6 [Old Version]

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

 

 

Don't take my word for it that's a quote from the title of a recent post excoriating this irritating and increasingly bloated product on Slashdot.

Be warned: Adobe has not learned its lesson, and despite the outcry that followed the release of version 6, this latest release of Acrobat continues Adobe's aggressive trend of intruding into your desktop environment, again, as in version 6 without providing an easy way to undo the damage once its done--in fact, it's now nearly impossible. Like earlier releases, this version of Acrobat adds startup macros and new toolbar buttons to your existing applications and adds menu entries to your desktop "right click" menus. Adobe argues that these are conveniences, but they are entirely unnecessary (for most of us "printing" to Adobe PDF achieves the same result, is much more convenient, and a more natural model), and clutter what for most users is either a too-crowded user interface (for those who don't have the knowledge or patience to customize it) or a carefully tuned one (for those who do). Unlike many well-behaved applications that provide obvious ways of avoiding this kind of intrusive and disruptive behavior (e.g. through a simple checkbox option in a settings dialog), Acrobat's "option" for disabling this behavior, once deeply hidden in the setup process,is now almost completely absent. To disable the "Convert to Adobe PDF" button that mysteriously appears in the Outlook mail editor, for example, one has to be sure to choose "this feature will not be available" from the "Microsoft Outlook" option under "Acrobat PDFMaker" under "Create Adobe PDF". Simply deleting the button using Outlook's toolbar customization feature will not work: it comes right back when the editor is next opened. Similar problems arise in Word, Excel, Visio, Project, and Internet Explorer. And there's simply no way to get rid of the never-used "Convert to Adobe PDF" and "Combine in Acrobat..." entries in that appear in the desktop context menus for files (even if one installs none of the Acrobat PDFMaker features).

For the technically inclined wishing to repair some of the damage that Acrobat 7 does, there are complex but largely effective step by step instructions available on the web, but even the authors of these are driven to despair by version 7: ("Adobe has really pushed the boat out with Acrobat 7 and managed to screw Word royally") .

In short, Acrobat will make a mess of your working environment, there's no way to completely fix it, and even the partial fix is a pain (and not well documented). (This may seem a minor issue, but if every application followed Adobe's reckless example, our working environments would start to look like strip malls, crowded with features screaming for our attention to the point where it is hard to find what we need when we need it. One of the great strengths of the personal computer desktop is that users can configure it in ways that suit their needs; no application should interfere with that.)

Experienced Acrobat users will also notice that this version continues another frustrating trend for Acrobat (and most other Adobe applications): it is yet again slower to launch than the previous version. In fact, on my 2 GHz Pentium 4, it takes longer to launch than the entire Visual Studio .NET development environment, and longer than the boot sequence for Windows XP!

There are other minor problems as well (arbitrary rearrangements of menu and tool bar items, etc.) but these two major flaws are more than bad enough. Unless you really need the latest Acrobat features, you should probably avoid this upgrade. And if the "improvements" in this release are any indication of where Adobe plans to go with future releases, it may be time to start looking elsewhere for a tool for digital document management.

Fortunately, there's no reason at all to upgrade. Version 7 offers no usefully new features, so you can (and should) avoid this one (at all costs).

I have been using v.7 from the last week or so and i am very pleased with it. It loads very fast (unlike all other adobe versions), the conversion to PDF from doc or ppt files also is much quicker.

I have not encountered any problems yet, but its only been 7 days since i am using it..

Definitely worth the upgrade.

If you use Microsoft Office (Word, Excel) don't buy it! Links to your previous .pdf simply don't work. Adobe knows about it, but have no viable work around. Stick with prevous versions.

Honestly, I don't know how much more they can improve Adobe Acrobat. It is an excellent product, and a god-send for electronic file management.

I upgraded from version 6.0. The only problem I had with 6.0 is that it seemed terribly slow.

This new version seems much brisker. It loads quickly, and files seem to "print" to it much more quickly than version 6.0. I do not utilize the "one-button" feature it provides in MS Office and other programs. I try to keep all my programs as non-integrated as possible, because my previous experiences showed that they really, really bog each other down, no matter how much their makers claim they won't.

I don't come close to using all the features of Acrobat, but for my needs, it far surpasses anything else I've tried (or researched).

If you're having problems with version 6.0, or have an older version that you just want upgraded, I strongly recommend this. However, I don't foresee ever needing to upgrade Acrobat again.

Version 6 seemed to go off the track by changing many users' favorite features, like form ordering along with how unattractive bookmarks had become. More than anything, version 7 increases one's ability to collaborate securely, providing complete control over your document, who can open, print, or even comment on it. But version 7 is more of a fix than a major upgrade, as it cures many of the ills of the previous version. Best of all, Adobe has kept the price the same. Very nice!

Simple. It loads like a blaze. Sure all the new frills and features like easy annotations are neat, but the speed of 7.0 alone makes it worth every dime. Especially if your current Acrobat is the half-baked clunky 6.0.x that burst through the gates before it had legs.

Obviously bogus reviews. Version 6 was slow as a dog, so any improvement will make this more interesting. Of course rasing the price to $300 and $450 is less interesting. What about those of us that upgraded to the slow dog 6 and unintalled it to return to v5? how bout tossing us all a bone?