Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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142 of 153 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Worse than Malware, March 23, 2005
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.(1)
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(2), 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).
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37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
BEWARE - massive compatibility issues, June 17, 2005
That's right if you have fillable forms created in a previous version and expect to change them, your out of luck. I thought compatibility was the cornerstone of Acrobat.
Our firm does over $300 Million worth of business a year. We thought that Acrobat Professional ability to create fillable forms that could be shared, updated, and filled out by clients was a blessing. We not have dozens of worthless forms. And then there's the embarrassment when a client with Acrobat 7 can't fill out a form. THINK OF THE COST!
Adobe's site doesn't even mention the issue (although, their site search and help system is so poor that it may be their somewhere - who knows.)
At first, I thought I was doing something wrong. But, when I called support I was told that forms were not compatible. The service person then told me that she thought there might be a fix. However, without a service plan we'd have to pay to talk to Technical Support. We paid good money for this software (we buy multiple licenses) and only had this version for two days.
Considering the magnitude of this issue. I'm guessing there are other major problems with this release of Acrobat..
Adobe should fire its entire staff of software developers and the arrogant managers who let this software hit the market without providing fully functional compatibility.
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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
How to fix the Acrobat integration mess, February 5, 2006
The other reviewers are right -- Acrobat has gone to ridiculous extremes with their "integration" efforts, made far worse by the decision to make it effectively impossible to control the unwanted "Acrobat Everywhere" intrusion.
Fortunately, I have found an extremely easy way to remedy the problem: rename the directory where all of the integration files are installed. I'm posting the instructions here since I found these reviews after doing a Google search looking for a way to disable the integration, so hopefully others in the same predicament will find their way here.
Under C:\Program Files, open the Adobe directory, then open the Acrobat directory. You should see a folder named PDFMaker. Rename it (I chose something obvious, like disablePDFMaker.)
Viola. Upon restarting Outlook, Word, or other affected applications, the Office app won't be able to locate the DLLs and other Acrobat files, and will simply ignore the integrated components. (For the technically minded, these are COM DLLs, so I guess you could unregister them, but I was in a hurry, this works, and it's a lot easier to explain to the average Amazon user.)
It's sad, too -- PDFs are a great idea, and Acrobat itself is a powerful tool, but Adobe just seems to have lost all grip on reality when it comes to estimating the importance of Acrobat in the average user's daily routine.
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