Over the past few months, I’ve received a number of inquiries about Acrobat and Office 2010 compatibility.
Adobe Acrobat X is the first version of Acrobat to support Microsoft Office 2010.
| The Acrobat 9 PDF Maker toolbars do not function or appear in Microsoft Office 2010! |
Didn’t Acrobat 9 ship recently? Why doesn’t Acrobat 9 support Office 2010?
The timeline below shows that Acrobat 9 shipped two years before Office 2010.
- Acrobat 9 shipped in June 2008
- Microsoft Office 2010 shipped in June 2010
- Adobe Acrobat X shipped in November 2010
What does Adobe mean by “support for Office 2010”?
Adobe Acrobat X installs toolbars and advanced integration— called PDF Makers— into Office 2010 applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
In addition to offering one-click conversion from Office applications, the PDF Makers enable additional functions within Acrobat and Windows Explorer. In fact, Acrobat itself relies on the PDF Makers working correctly for important functions.
Can’t users just print to the PDF Print Driver?
The Adobe PDF Print driver offers basic PDF creation via the Print command.
Output from the PDF Print Driver is not functionally equivalent to that of the Adobe PDF Makers.
What will my organization miss if I do not install the Acrobat X PDF Makers?
Here are a few of the key features that will be missed using an earlier version of Acrobat with Office 2010.
- Bookmarks
- Links (Navigational links such as cross-references, table of contents, footnotes and endnotes)
- PDF Creation from Windows Explorer
- Combine multiple file types (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) into a single PDF
- Convert comments in Word, Excel and PowerPoint to PDF Comments
- Comment Routing from PDF back to Word
- Select worksheets for conversion in Excel
- Create PDF and automatically attach to email
- Tagged PDF for accessibility
- PDF/A-1A (PDF for Archiving)
- Multimedia Embedding
- Optimized conversion of PowerPoint
- Converts speaker notes from PowerPoint
- Create custom mail-merged PDF and automatically attach to email
- Manual and automatic archiving of email from Outlook and Lotus Notes
What Office 2010 applications are supported by Acrobat X?
Acrobat X installs into the standard Microsoft Office ribbon interface in supported applications:
Acrobat X offers PDF Maker integration for the following Office 2010 applications:
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft Excel
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- Microsoft Outlook
- Microsoft Visio (Pro only)
- Microsoft Project (Pro only)
- Microsoft Access (Pro only)
- Microsoft Publisher (Pro only)
Although many of the conversion options are common to all Office applications, some PDF maker
functions are application-specific.
Do the Acrobat PDF Makers work in Office 64-bit mode?
Yes. The Acrobat 10.1 update (June 2011) introduced 64-bit versions of the PDF Makers.
What do the Acrobat X ribbons look like in Office 2010?
Here are a few examples:
Microsoft Word 2010 PDF Maker
Microsft Excel 2010 PDF Maker
Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 PDF Maker
Microsoft Outlook 2010 PDF Maker
Microsoft Visio 2010 PDF Maker
Comments
I previously used Outlook 2007, where the ability to save individual emails and their attachments as a PDF file was invaluable. I now use Outlook 2010 and that function no longer exists; I have to archive emails as .pst files. Highly annoying. I am told by other lawyer users that upgrading to Adobe 10 will not solve this problem. True? Any plans by Adobe or Microsoft to address this?
You will need Acrobat X for compatibility with Office 2010. Acrobat 9 shipped about 30 months before Office 2010 and will not be upgraded for compatibility with Office 2010.
I can now withdraw the previous comment. I upgraded to Acrobat X Pro and with some help from online chat support was able to download version 10.1.1 which supports my 64-bit Microsoft Office. It was necessary to restart Outlook before the Adobe PDF tab appeared. It seems to work just great!
Glad it worked out for you.
If converting from excel (2010) to pdf using Acrobat X, cell borders that are any colour apart from black will be the wrong thickness. Thin borders will be thicker than they should be in the pdf. Any ideas how to correct this?
Acrobat is enhancing thin lines which can give the on-screen appearance that certain colored lines are thicker. If that bother you, can turn this feature off by going to Edit>Preferences and turning of “Enhance Thin Lines”
I have Windows XP SP3 PC, Adobe Acrobat 9 and just upgraded from Office 2007 to Office 2010. I used to be able to run a mail merge to PDF and email in Office 2007. Ever since I upgraded to Office 2010 I can’t. Is this compatible?
Acrobat 9 is not compatible with Microsoft Office 2010. You will need to upgrade to Acrobat X for that functionality.
Will PDF Maker integration for Visio 2010 Standard ever be available?
I don’t think so, no.
I have Windows 7 SP1, 64-Bit, running Acrobat X & MS Office 2010. Can’t get the Acrobat ribbon (PDF Maker) to show up in Outlook. Any suggestions?
Some IT folks disable it. Otherwise, ensure that Outlook isn’t turning off the ribbon (File>Options>Addins)
I have Windows 7 64-bit running Acrobat X 10.1.1 and Office 2010 32bit, but unless I run Acrobat X as administrator the PDFmaker will not work and returns an error. Any idea where the permissions need to be changed to allow a regular user to use this functionality within Acrobat?
It sounds like you need to re-install. I recommend checking with your IT folks to use a package built for your specific environment.
The Acrobat 10.1 update (June 2011) introduced 64-bit versions of the PDF Maker
What version of Acrobat should be used if 32-bit Office-2010 is installed on 64-bit Win7 OS? Acrobat 10 or 10.1? or both will work?
Either will work. The installer is smart enough to recognize the version of Office installed.
I’m want to upgrade my CS4 to CS5, which includes Adobe X. I have Acrobat 9 now, and find when I PDF an Excel document (2007 version) that includes links to multiple cells within the Excel document, the PDF strips the links to those referenced cells. Has this been resolved with Adobe X (Acrobat 10)?
I haven’t heard about that. Ensure that your PDF Maker preferences have “Add Link” enabled.
I used to be able to see a thumbnail image of my pdf file when set as an attachment within my Microsoft Access 2010 Database. Once Acrobat X came out the functionality ceased to where now I can only see the standard PDF icon instead of the thumbnail of the particular PDF document. Will the functionality ever return to see the image again? The newer Acrobat reader versions have forced me to seperately imbed bitmap images for the same effect. Taking away from both the presentability of the database and adding significantly to my file size.
On 64-bit systems, I don’t believe the default thumbnailing is available anymore.
I use Word 2010 and Acrobat X professional at work to generate technical documents. I find that there are issues when I have graphics and text on the same page. The PDF output is missing images and text. most of the doc I use would have 2 colums per page. I have been able to PDF documents by moving the text to a seperate page from the images but this is not good enough for the final release.
Is there any known solution ti these issues?
That shouldn’t be happening. Make sure you update to the latest version of Acrobat X and try again.
I am using Acrobat X with Word 2010. Recently we have encountered a problem with figures in complex documents. Parts of figures are being randomly dropped or scrambled in the PDF. About the only surefire way to get a PDF with good figures is to print to PDF, and even this is not 100%, and you lose a lot of valuable features.
We have searched the web to see if anyone else is having these problems, to no avail. This is the only site I have found with people posting anything similar to our problems.
Is anyone else experiencing these problems? How have you addressed them?
I believe this was fixed in our 10.1.3 update.
I upgraded to Office 2010 – How can I get Acrobat X for Word, Excel and Outlook?
What is the cost of the upgrade?
How many machines can I use it on?
You can buy an upgrade to Acrobat X directly from Adobe (click the store link on the adobe.com site) or from the reseller of your choice. If you are upgrading five machines or more, you can buy a pack of 5+ with a single serial number. Our license for Acrobat is a user license. The same user may use it on up to two machines. e.g. a home computer and a work computer as long as they are not in use at the same time.
Are updates in the works for Adobe 9 Pro to work with Windows 2010? I have to convert documents from MS Office 2003, 2007 & 2010 and really do not feel I should have to upgrade to Adobe 10 when MS Office older versions are supported longer than just 4 years?
You only need to upgrade if you also upgrade to Office 2010. Office 2007 and earlier versions can open the DOCX file format. If you do need to upgrade of Office 2010, you will need to upgrade your copy of Acrobat.
Just to be clear, since my IT folks seem clueless. I have Acrobat professional 8.0 (windows) and Office 2010. In terms of PDF maker, I’m SOL without upgrading to Acrobat X, is that what I’m hearing? There’s no patch to 8 that’ll give me the functionality to make a PDF (ideally, from within Acrobat from multiple word files)?
Sorry, Bennet. Reader 8 has been out of official support for over a year. Only Acrobat X is compatible with Office 2010.
Hi, Rick – I do proofreading for a court reporter who sends me ASCII’s and then I convert to PDF, use iAnnotate on my iPad to edit, and then return to her. (iPad’s PDF converter app doesn’t accurately convert, either.) I followed your instructions from your blog from ’06 “Converting Depo Transcripts to PDF,” but my settings on Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro are not the same; hence, I still cannot get an accurate translation. I use Windows 7 Enterprise, Version 6.1 Can you help me “tweak” Adobe or offer any suggestions as to how I can get these transcripts accurately translated? Thanks much! Dave
I’m not sure you mean “my settings are not the same”. Essentially, the blog post you refers to talks about changing the default typeface and style when doing ASCII depo conversion. That normally works pretty well if switched to a monospaced font. Acrobat isn’t a transcript tool, so you might want to think about buying a transcript viewer and then converting to PDF>
I am using Acrobat 8 with Office 10. I can create PDFS with no problem but haven’t been able to merge word documents from the original files. Any suggestions? Thank you.
Acrobat 8 is not compatible with Office 2010, sorry.
I have a problem with encapsulated postscript graphics being very badly rendered by the Adobe PDF Maker in Word 2010, whereas they come out perfectly if I simply print to the PDF Print Driver. The problem with the print driver of course is that it does not provide navigational links such as cross-references, table of contents etc. My documents require both high quality graphics and navigational links.
To recreate my problem, open a new file in Word 2010, use Insert > Picture to insert an encapsulated postscript graphic such as ” ht2_fixbin.eps”, which you can google or find at
http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/physics/exotic/r2a/20080410.gbjmet/public_gbjmet/figures/ht2_fixbin.eps
(You can simply paste that link into the insert dialogue.)
Now create two PDFs, using the PDF Maker and print to PDF Print Driver respectively.
On my system, the Print version is perfect: the text is text and the blobs are perfect circles; whereas the Maker version is very messed up: the text has become some jagged shapes, the blobs are likewise and the line thicknesses have increased.
I am using Microsoft Word Version: 14.0.6106.5005 (32-bit) and Adobe Acrobat X Version 10.1.0.534 on a machine running Windows 7 64-bit.
I would be very grateful for any suggestions that might help me to deal with this. Many thanks, Murray
I was able to perfectly output EPS files from Office 2010 on my Win7 Machine. My suggestion is to resave the EPS graphics using Adobe Illustrator. EPS — encapsulated postscript — is a device specific format and using it has fallen out of favor. When printing to PDF, the Postscript interpreter normalizes the file to fix issues, but I don’t think that happens with the PDF Maker. I’d need a sample to check it out.
I can normally create a pdf from Excel. I now have a situation where Adobe can’t create pdf. It works normally on othe rexcel files. I am using Excel 2007 and Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard
Might be something odd about that spreadsheet. Try copying all of the data to a new worksheet, or doing a SAVE AS in another format.
I, too, have found that PDF Maker (Acrobat X 10.1.3) plugged in to Word 2010 gives odd results compared to simply printing to the Adobe PDF printer driver. Specifically, I have a header with two words on two lines (company name), but with very tight linespacing to bring them close together. They also have several of Word’s text special effects applied (Gradient Fill-blue, Accent-1, Outline-white, Shadow). PDFs generated by the PDF Maker plug-in put both these words about 3″ to 4″ down on the page — far below where they should be in the header! Outputting through PDF printer driver preserves their correct location.
Adobe can you look into this discrepancy, and hopefully fix it? Thx
I’d need a sample file to troubleshoot this.
I am trying to print out multiple sheets using the PDFMaker addin in Excel but it is cutting off the right columns in some sheets and printing them in others with the same print settings. If I print them individually they are printing properly. I am using Acrobat X in Excel 2010.
You will need to set the print area for each of the worksheets. Use Print Preview in Excel to do that for each sheet.
Howdy just stumbled upon your website via Yahoo after I typed in, “Acrobat and Microsoft Office 2010 Compatibility Acrobat for Legal Professionals” or something similar (can’t quite remember exactly). Anyhow, I’m happy I found it simply because your subject material is exactly what I’m searching for (writing a university paper) and I hope you don’t mind if I collect some material from here and I will of course credit you as the source. Appreciate it.
Go right ahead. Glad you like the blog. I don’t get to post as often as I’d like to anymore.
I have Win 7 and MS Office 2010. When I convert my MS Power Point to Acrobat the heading section on the slides is not printed?
Are the headers showing properly in Print Preview? I’d try 1) Copying your slides to a new presentation template. 2) Use a different font for the header.
Recently updated from Office 2003 to 2010. I have installed Acrobat X. When I try to create a .pdf from MS Publisher, the program crashes and freezes half-way through the creation process. I have to CTRL-ALT-DEL and end MS Publisher through the Window Task Manager. I’ve reinstalled Office 2010 with all updates….no luck. Thoughts? Suggestions?
I think a call to support is in order. 800-642-3623 Monday-Friday, 6am-5pm (Pacific time)
We have an issue where a chart within Office 2010 PPTX formate exported to PDF 10.1.2 shows jaggy lines, but if we export from Office 2007 format, then it exports fine. Is this a known issue
I’m not aware of it myself, but make sure the PDF settings are the same on both machines from PPT.
I have been using Adobe Acrobat 5 with Publisher 2007 since 07 without any problems. Recently I installed Adobe Acrobat 9 and now I can’t save a PDF in CMYK (a requirement by the graphic artist for printing purposes). I can only save the PDF in RGB. As a result I am going to have to go over my entire newsletter publication and re-make all the ads and standard headings where AA9 has issues. The problem can be something as small as rejecting a white font in a caption, to rejecting a font created as a jpeg that I have been using for many years. It seems that these things won’t embed.
If I buy Microsoft Publisher 2010, will AA9 be more compatible with Publisher? If not, is there another way around this other than having to rebuild my entire newsletter?
Ian.
Try: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826360
I have Miscrosoft Off 2010 and Adobe Acrobat X Pro 10. I lose data in some pdfs that have been combined into a binder. The lost data is a typed in content onto a pdf form that had been saved. Proofreading each output would impact time management, especially if our “plans and drawings” have lost data. Appreciate your assistance.
When combining, you will receive a warning about duplicate form fields. Any fields in multiple forms that you combine will be unified with the data in the first instance. You should flatten the forms before combining or use a PDF Portfolio instead.
I’m having an issue between MS Word and Adobe Acrobat X Standard. I can PDF without issue when I’m in Word. However, when I’m in Acrobat X, Word does not appear in the list of All Supported Formats (excel, powerpoint and publisher are on that list). Therefore, from within Acrobat X, I can’t combine a Word file. Any and all assistance would be appreciated!
I’d recommend re-installing Acrobat. If that doesn’t work, a call to support is in order. 800-642-3623, Monday-Friday, 6am-5pm (Pacific time)
I did re-install. I called support. They said it might be a Microsoft issue, so I re-installed the Microsoft Office suite. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
I wish I had some ideas for you other than making sure Office and Windows are patched to the latest version before you install Acrobat.
When converting an email into a pdf in Outlook 2010, a field with the to/from/subject line always appears above the email itself. How do I get rid of said bar without having to constantly extract the actual pdf from the portfolio?
We never had this problem with Acrobat 9 and Outlook 2003 but now we have it with Acrobat X, Outlook 2010.
The from and to are an important part of an email archive. As far as I know, Acrobat has always converted them in the PDF. You don’t need to actually extract the PDF from the Portfolio. You can open it from the portfolio, redact the words you want, and save it back to the portfolio. If you know all the strings you want to search for, you can use the Search and Redact feature to mark all found words in all the documents in a PDF portfolio. To do so, put the Portfolio in a folder and use that folder as the Source. You can then use an Action to Apply Redactions using the same folder as the source.
Is there an option when making the PDF that the notes and slides show up on the same page, instead of the notes being put into a text box? We are currently using a separate driver that lets me put the notes and slides on the same page, but it only lets me highlight the notes section and turns the upper slides into a graphic, so the type cannot be highlighted.
You can switch to the Notes view in PowerPoint and print that to PDF using the AdobePDF print driver.
My Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard allowed me to .pdf portfolio my Outlook 2007 email and attachments. This was very convenient for archiving. However, after installing Outlook 2010, this convenience went away.
Can I purchase an Adobe Acrobat X Standard Upgrade to resume creating .pdf portfolios with my Outlook 2010 email and attachments?
You will need Acrobat X or XI for compatibility with Office 2010. You can upgrade from your current version.
Running Word 2010 32 bit and Acrobat X Pro, when converting .docx to .pdf, Acrobat shrinks the image to a fraction of the size (top left of page) and mirror images the document. If I save to .doc, the conversion is fine. I’ve reinstalled Acrobat X, no change. ??
I haven’t run into this one. I’d suggest contacting Adobe Support: http://helpx.adobe.com/contact/
Using MS Office Pro 2010 (32 bit) and just upgraded to Adobe Acrobat XI Pro and now tables with any color/highlight other than standard Black text on White background convert as solid black – almost appears as if the entire table has been redacted. How do I fix this? The table appears fine in Adobe Reader X.
I wasn’t able to reproduce this error. You might try a different PDF setting in the Word PDF Maker preferences.
I am converting Excel (MS2010) into Adobe Acrobat Pro 9. However, when I click view Bookmarks, nothing appears. In the previous MS Office Application, I used to be able to convert into PDF with bookmarks.
Did anyone encounter the same problem?
Acrobat 9 is not compatible with Office 2010. You will need Acrobat X or XI for compatibility and the ability to create bookmarked files from Excel.
We use Word 2010 templates which consist of tables into which data is imported. The table borders have no attributes set (we are aware that in Word there is no option to set a zero border width). These are then turned into PDF using Acrobat X. On devices such as ipad and iphones, you can see the gridlines where the table has a solid colour background, yet on other devices such as Samsung Galaxy – you cannot see the gridlines. Any ideas why this is happening?
You didn’t mention what PDF viewers you are using, so it is hard to say. In Adobe Reader, depending on the border width, and the zoom level, it is possible you might not see them, depending on your view settings.
Is Acrobat XI Pro capable of converting MS Office documents (docx) to PDF by itself or does it require to have also the office suite installed on the same machine (Windows) ? I understand that the PDF conversion can be launched either from the Office suite or from Acrobat itself but what if the MS Office Suite is not installed? I ask this question because we are looking for a way to automate the process of PDF conversion on a server.
Acrobat requires Office to be installed to convert Office files. Adobe does offer a server-based tool called LiveCycle PDF Generator that offers server-based PDF creation.
So is Adobe XI Pro then also compatible with Windows 2010?
Hi, We recently upgraded to Adobe XI Pro. Now the pdf add-in for Access 2010 does not work (Professional 2010 32bit) on a 32 bit XP workstation. Is this supported? If it is, please tell me how I can fix this. When I try to add using File, Options, Add-Ins with in Access 2010, do not see an option. Please help.
We no longer offer the Access PDF Maker, sorry!
I can’t open a Word doc in Adobe Acrobat X, nor can I batch convert word docx files. Microsoft word is not listed as an available program to convert to PDF. For example, opening Edit>>Preferences, Categories | Convert to PDF – it’s not there. I have over 100 documents to convert to PDF, and printing them one by one is a hassle. Why is Word not listed, and why can’t I batch convert word documents?
There could be a couple of reasons. 1) You are on the Mac. Office Mac does not have an SDK which allows us to create the functionality. 2) You haven’t installed or have disabled the PDF Makers for Word on the PC. 3) Your installation is corrupt and you should reinstall Acrobat.
I have Adobe Acrobat X Pro and Office 2010. I am using Windows XP SP3. I cannot print Powerpoint notes pages to pdf. In Powerpoint, my notes pages are set to display the slide image large (basically, the notes page looks just like the slide, and there are extra text boxes with notes added). I can view the notes pages in Powerpoint just fine. When I print to pdf, all I get is blank pages. I never had a problem with Acrobat 9.
I no longer use XP, but I am able to print Office 2010 PPT files with notes to PDF on Windows 7. Sorry, I am not able to replicate this for you.
I use Outlook 2010, Acrobat X and Win 7. When I try to print an email and its pdf attachments, the email message will print fine, but as for the attachments, I get this error message from Adobe Acrobat: “There was an error opening this document. The file cannot be found.” I can save and print the file separately, but it’s not quite as easy as printing it automatically with the email message itself. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Are you trying to print from Acrobat or Outlook? Sorry, I’m not familiar with that error message.
I am experiencing the same issue. I’m using Adobe Reader XI and Office 2010 SP1 on Windows XP x86 SP3. All software is up to date. When printing more than one PDF file using Outlook 2010, Adobe Reader will open and print the first PDF. Then Reader will give an error for each of the following PDF’s stating “There was an error opening this document. The file cannot be found.”… This occurs when using the standard Print dialogue, as well as through Quick Print.
In my testing, QuickPrint was not active when I had more than one PDF document selected. I was able to reproduce the error when printing, but I believe this is likely an Office issue, not a Reader issue.
MS Outlook 2007 and Adobe Pro 11 seem incompatible, is this true?
No, that is not true.
After installing Acrobat XI on a Mac it works, but I cant find the ribbon in Office 2010. Any Idea how to solve this issue?
Office on the Mac does not provide the ability for third party apps to hook into it, so there is no Acrobat ribbon on the Mac.
PDF-ing a file in Powerpoint 2010 ‘with transparency objects’ produces different result on Adobe PDF Makers and the PDF Print Driver?
Adobe PDF Makers output is the same as the source file in powerpoint.
PDF Print Driver produces grainy or fine lines in the output of the transparency objects of the source file.
”Output from the PDF Print Driver is not functionally equivalent to that of the Adobe PDF Makers.”
Is that the above the reason why I am getting the grainy result print on PDF using the PDF Print Driver? Or is there any setting I need to set to achieve the same result on the PDF Print Driver?
Pls advise, thanks
Generally, the PDF Makers offer superior conversion to the PDF Printer. You didn’t say what version of Acrobat you are using or what setting you are using, both affect output. For the best results, use the Standard setting.
Does acrobat standard XI have PDF makers for excel, word and outlook 2013?
Yes
I recently updated my MS visio to visio 2010. I does not contain the Adobe Acrobat Ribbon.
I have Adobe Acrobat X, I have a suite of Microsoft Office products all are 2010. All my other MS office products contain the Adobe Acrobat Ribbon, is there a way to get the ribbon added to my recently updated Visio 2010
Thanks
You should check that you haven’t disabled the add-in for Acrobat in Visio.
I have Microsoft Excel 2010 and Acrobat X Pro and I have used the Acrobat ribbon to create a PDF from my excel document, however my hyperlinks in the PDF are not working and I have check and add links is ticked in preferences. Can you please help?
I am unable to reproduce this issue. What is the destination for the hyperlink? A URL or somewhere else in the document?
I used to be able to select multiple Word Docs from Windows Explorer and convert them into multiple individual PDF files with bookmarks (using XP, Office 2007, Acrobat 8 Standard). Lately, My computer was upgraded to Windows 7 with Office 2010 and Acrobat X Standard. The multiple files selection function still exist; however, I am encountering following problems:
1. The files converted all bookmarks are disappeared
2. The save file screen pop up twice. First one was asking me to save to where It starting to convert, after the PDF converting screen finished, it will ask me again to save the file in the root directory – this is the when the files are really saving.
3. Word 2010 will keep telling me my normal.doc was amended and asking me if I want to save the updated one.
I tried to search all over the web and seems no one encountering the problem. Could anyone let me know if you have the problem? Is any setting in Acrobat can be amended to resolve the problem?
Thanks,
It sounds like more than one thing is going wrong on your computer, especially if your normal.dot file is getting changed. I would first update both Office and Acrobat to the most current dot release for the products. If that doesn’t work, you should uninstall and re-install Acrobat and possible Office as well.