My neighbor, a retired physicist, recently bought Adobe Acrobat to create PDFs. I almost told him that he didn’t need to spend money to create PDFs — that free utilities such as PrimoPDF can do the same thing. After all, both turn documents into highly portable documents. Then it occurred to me that maybe there were features in his product that I don’t get in my product. After all, he’s a smart guy. The only thing I see him spending money on needlessly is really great wine. But since I’m frequently the recipient of some of that wine, I’m hardly in a position to complain.

So what’s Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional have that I don’t get with my software?

Adobe’s utility allows you to sew together multiple documents into one cohesive whole. Instead of sending a jumble of Word and Excel files as email attachments, you can compile them into one entity, ordered or reordered as you wish, and send that.

With Acrobat you can create forms that people can fill out using Adobe Reader and return electronically. Then you can export that data into a spreadsheet and do analysis. Right now to do that, I would have to use some other program, such as survey software or some kind of spreadsheet-based form, which is much more time-consuming to create.

When multiple people need to work on a document together, Adobe lets you do this. Sure, Word allows the same kind of use, but this goes beyond text. You can use sticky notes, stamps, highlighting and other tools to mark up a document. Review participants can see each other’s comments and track status of review. You can sort comments by author, date and page. And every time you open the shared document, you see the updates to it.

Ever created a PDF, then noticed just as you were about to send it off to your client that a typo crept into the first paragraph of text? Drats! Adobe lets you make small changes in the PDF, including to text, spacing, images and tables.

One thing I’ve noticed: This software is pricey; but the prices are all over the map. Some vendors are charging considerably less than others for the same edition. That said, when you’re ordering, make sure that you’re not ordering an upgrade edition — unless you truly are upgrading.

Maybe I’ll go over to my neighbor’s place for happy hour this week and see what else Adobe Acrobat offers that I’m missing out on.

Posted on April 22nd, 2008 by dian