IT Pro Verdict

There are a few areas that could be neater, but by and large Acrobat Pro X is up to Adobe’s exacting standards. It feels like a professional product, with features that address everyday needs of its users and are elegantly executed.Whether Adobe’s attempt to expand PDF format into rich media and interactivity will catch on remains to be seen, but there’s little to fault in its implementation. For those with less ambitious aims, this isn’t a must-have upgrade. Still, for new and existing users alike, it’s easy to see how Adobe justifies Acrobat Pro X’s premium price.

By Ben Pitt

published 30 November 2010

in Reviews

For documents originating in Word 2010, changes can be imported back into the original document for approval. However, this process proved to be messy and confusing. The dialog box for reviewing changes appeared to have a bug that made some of the text unreadable; perhaps that explains why Accepted and Rejected tags made elsewhere weren't visible, and the results were often erratic. Word's own Track Changes feature is much more polished and agreeable.

Acrobat Pro X has been updated to integrate with Office 2010, adding tools such as the one described above into an Acrobat tab on the Ribbon. Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher and PowerPoint all include buttons for Create PDF, Create and Attach to Email and Create and Send for Review. Word also includes a Mail Merge button, sending personalised PDFs by email to a mailing list. Outlook's PDF tab is designed for email archiving, either manually per message or folder or automatically based on a schedule. Archives and activity logs can be saved over a network, and can include embedded indexes for faster search.

Meanwhile, plug-ins for Internet Explorer and Firefox capture web pages to PDF with a single click, complete with active links. The Internet Explorer plug-in also includes an option to click on specific areas within a page to be included a convenient way to exclude extraneous clutter from a captured page.

Word and PowerPoint (but strangely, not Publisher) also get an Embed Flash button, which brings in pre-prepared Flash animations in SWF format, as long as they're self-contained rather than relying on other files. They also accept MP3, Flash Video (FLV) and various other video formats, which are given an SWF wrapper with transport controls and automatically converted to FLV where necessary.

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