Adobe Acrobat X Pro Review

Adobe Acrobat X Pro is available as a standalone product, or in the new Adobe Acrobat X Suite, which includes:

• Acrobat X Pro
• Photoshop CS5
• Adobe Captivate 5
• Adobe Presenter 7
• Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES2 and
• Adobe Media Encoder CS5

What's New in Acrobat X Pro?

The Action Wizard

What is an action? If you are familiar with either Photoshop or Illustrator then you understand what actions are. You can think of it like a recipe where you enter in all the steps to get a specific result. When you tell the program to replay those steps, you're guaranteed to get the exact same results. Well, the action function has been saving Adobe users lots of time and frustration for years. Now, this feature is available in the new Acrobat X.

For organizations, this is more than a time-saving feature. By creating specific actions, administrators can ensure the consistent appearance of documents and branding. These actions can be exported and emailed. The newly received action can be double clicked and executed (like a mini program) to be imported and used on the users' system. The new action is automatically added to the Action Option menu. This is going to be a very popular feature.

Some of the pre-built actions include:

• Archive Paper Documents
• Prepare for Distribution
• Prepare for Review
• Prepare for Web Publishing
• Publish Sensitive Documents
• Create Accessible PDFs

Easily Manage Shared Reviews

So, what’s a shared review? When developing a document, either for internal use or a client, you now have the option to send it out for review. Of course, you could always do that, but with the shared review feature, you can receive suggestions and comments in an organized and constructive way. By using Acrobat.com web service the comments are connected, or tagged, to the specific area of the document that it relates to. So when you want to review the required changes and suggestions, it is part of the review document. See who suggested what, when and for what part of the document. This feature will be of special interest to online businesses, as Web pages can be saved into the PDF, and sent for review to management teams or clients.

This great collaboration tool will save time, and make it easier to get specific feedback on developing projects.

Export Data into MS Word or Excel – and Maintain Formatting

This is a feature long overdue. For years Adobe and Microsoft just didn’t get along. Then Microsoft began offering the ability to save their Word and Excel documents into PDF format. And now users have the ability to go the other way and export into Microsoft format from a PDF. And what’s really great is that it can be in whole – or in part. Tables inside of a PDF file maintain their formatting when exported into an Excel spreadsheet. I expected a few glitches, but it worked flawlessly. This simple feature will eliminate needless data re-entry and recreation of existing documents.

What’s Improved in Acrobat X Pro?

PDF Portfolio – Enhanced Functionality

A PDF Portfolio is a relatively new format that can group a set of documents into one file, without changing each individual file. Individual files are easily viewed inside of the portfolio or extracted from it.

Files that can be part of a portfolio include:

• PDF
• Microsoft Office Files, including Word and Excel
• Live Websites
• Embedded or linked videos
• Images
• Flash files

While PDF Portfolios aren’t new in this version, they are much easier to work with. Just 3 easy steps will produce a great PDF Portfolio.

Simply choose Create PDF Portfolio > Choose Layout > Add Files. From here you can customize background image, file order, color palette, and fonts. Without any design experience or the need for other programs, quickly and easily make a professional and function portfolio.

Some Other Enhanced Features Include:

• Improved data collection
• Permanent Information Removal
• Advanced Security Tools
• Improved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of Scanned Documents

An alternative to Adobe Acrobat is NitroPro. Check out the NitroPro 7 Review.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer.