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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Software unusable for signing documents in high throughput, November 2, 2003
I am a physician who has his medical records stored in PDF format. What I do is get documents in PDF format in a number of ways, and then electronically sign them. I annotate the files about a third of the time with short text notes. Acrobat 5 worked OK, but had a number of glitches such as not dealing with file names over 32 characters, crashed on paste into text areas, and it lost files on occasion. I expected version 6 would make a barely adequate product work in this environment. The apparent rants by the other reviewers are, unfortunately, spot on. From my standpoint, version 6 is a frustrating product for what is such a routine task, signing documents. In version 5 you could touch key "d" and the signature cursor would appear, you selected where the signature would appear, and a press of the return key completed the signature. In version 6 it works this way (once you set a number of preferences and your digital signature file): You use the mouse to click on the Sign Document tool button (The keystroke shortcut is gone - you HAVE to use the mouse), and up pops a dialog telling you that the document is not certified. You dismiss that dialog and another dialog pops up, where you select either visible or invisible mode for the signature (no way to set a preference, it ALWAYs pops up). You then get to draw the location for the sig. Then you get a dialog for why you are signing, like v5.x did, but now you have to go to the mouse and move to click the Save button, otherwise you get a save as dialog as the default. No way to preference that, either. The save process is a joke, except that it works so poorly every time that it is VERY frustrating. The previous reviewer who commented on the slowness of the save was being kind. The software scans the file multiple times to perform a number of housekeeping tasks with every save, EVEN IF IT JUST DID THEM ON A PREVIOUS SAVE. I know this because there is a cheery status bar on the bottom left that explains why your time is being wasted. I timed myself on this: 68 documents in 2 hours and 12 minutes. The Adobe people have made a number of decisions for the user on how to operate. This has caused a tremendous slowdown in workflow with 6 compared to version 5. The interface has lost a number of keystroke shortcuts, requires that you now switch between mouse and keyboard, and has added steps that induce fumbling in the interface and workflow. A BIG STEP SIDEWAYS. I am not going to use it at work unless some improvement in workflow is seen. I will not be able to keep up with my work with this poor interface, and I am only at about 25 documents a day to sign. Normally I get that done in 15 minutes, including time to annotate and do a few multiple saves on some of the docs. When I am at 50 to 75 signatures a day I would be spending an extra 2 hours a day at work if I needed to use Acrobat 6.0 Stay away from this one. By the way, if you look at my other reviews you'll see I'm generally a level headed sort. But with the time waste I put up using this package compared to v5 I felt I really had to join in and warn everyone about this one like the other reviewers have. Steve Holland, M.D.
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