Acrobat 9 Pro

Adobe's Acrobat 8 Professional, saw major leaps forward in nearly every function and feature of the august PDF creator. Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro (not Professional, just Pro) is a smaller update with a narrower focus. There are no major improvements for creating and distributing basic or even signed or certified PDF documents, nor will design and print industry workers discover anything added or significantly improved for them. Minor to moderate improvements and enhancements abound for all, but Acrobat 9 is aimed primarily at streamlining document collaboration and review, with the goal of easing forms creation and distribution running a close second. Business workgroups producing PDF files for review or data collection will definitely want to consider Acrobat 9.

The new version of Acrobat should be easy for anyone, even those with no Acrobat experience, to use out of the box. Already using Acrobat 8? You'll be proficient in Acrobat 9 with almost no learning curve. Menus and toolbars are largely the same, though thankfully tidied up a bit. It has the same love-it-or-hate-it user interface, with large, colorful toolbar buttons that are reminiscent of Microsoft Word's. Most common tasks are accessible from the main toolbar via drop-down menus; for instance, the Create menu includes commands to create PDFs from a file, scanner, Web page, the clipboard contents, or by combining multiple PDFs into one. Acrobat's performance is improved over the previous version, with the application launching in about half the time.

Forms

Adobe has struggled for years to promote PDF forms as a viable alternative to HTML forms. Anyone could create a form in previous versions of Acrobat; in Acrobat 9, creating and editing forms is even easier. A new Forms Editing mode replaces the Forms toolbar with a dedicated, streamlined workspace strictly for building and editing forms. Acrobat 9 also offers improved field recognition and auto-creation, and the ability to preview a form before finalizing it.

Regardless of how easy it was to create forms, the post-creation tasks were always what hindered widespread adoption. Collecting respondent data usually meant receiving results one at a time as e-mail attachments. Saving those attachments and aggregating them into a database or database-ready format was tedious. Connecting PDF forms to an automated data collection process required server software often too technical or too pricey for small- to mid-sized businesses. With Acrobat 9, Adobe gets it right, throwing wide the gates of data collection and opening PDF forms to everyone.

Released concurrently with Acrobat 9 is Acrobat.com, a groupware Web site (now in beta) enabling anyone with a free Adobe ID to create, store, share, and collaborate on PDF files and other documents. Using the Distribute Form wizard inside Acrobat 9, you can upload a form to Acrobat.com; a link to its online location will be distributed to your e-mail contacts without you ever needing to leave the application. Invited respondents complete and submit the form online, and then Acrobat.com transmits the data back to the creator's computer, where the Acrobat 9 application automatically collects the data--no muss, no fuss, no pestering IT.

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