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October 04, 2005
My thoughts on PDF in Office 12
So, Microsoft has decided to include the ability to save directly to PDF in Office 12. Of course when you create an open specification, as Adobe has done with PDF, the odds that creation of that document will become commoditized increase. This is big news for a lot of people, but for some of us, the question to Microsoft is really what took you so long? Anyone can download the freely available specification and build their own PDF creation tool. Wordperfect has it built in, OS X has had it built in since v. 10.0, and a quick search on Sourceforge.net brings up 45 projects for creating a variety PDF documents.
Some people are already saying that this is the end of Acrobat, as PDF creation becomes part of the core office suite. I don’t think so.
In my opinion, people are buying Acrobat for more than just the PDF creation. If you’re a power user, when was the last time you actually just PDFd a document and saved it to your computer. Maybe for a receipt from an online purchase, or some other confirmation, but I think that’s about it. That’s the equivalent of printing out a document just to have a paper record. And if you think about it, there are only a few real advantages to having a PDF document on your own computer compared to having the original file. If you’ve got the program to make the file, you’ve got the program to open the file. Side note: the main exception I’ve found with this is when dealing with HTML pages. I find it much easier to PDF an HTML page, rather than to save the .html file and then a sub-directory of all the images on the page. I prefer to have just one file to send to people.
People really want to share their documents with other people, however I think that most people also want to allow people to view and participate in their workflows. To me, that’s where Acrobat’s real value is. The ability to spin off a review and commenting workflow from directly in Word or Firefox is really the main use that I have for Acrobat these days. People then use Reader or Acrobat to comment in the document, and send it back to me. (Acrobat 7 allows people with the free reader client to participate in your review and commenting workflows). When the document comes back into my inbox, Acrobat merges the comments right back in to the Word document, I accept or reject all the comments, and my workflow is complete.
And if you agree with me that review and commenting is really the main use of Acrobat, then I can’t see how having save to PDF in Office is going to do anything but help Adobe. The first thing people are going to realize is that they can send out this file and everyone is going to be able to open it. That’s the first step, which some of us have known for a long time, but for others (over 30,000 searches for this per week according to Microsoft), this will solve a major problem for them. However, after they’ve found that out, the second step is that people are going to want their coworkers to comment and review on the document. Its just natural. You’ve got a document you want to share with others, and now you can guarantee they can open it. The next thing you’ll want to do is allow people to comment on the document. It’s the logical next step is sharing your documents, and for Office 12 at least, something that people can only do with a copy of Acrobat on their desktop.
Comments
Mike,
I don’t believe that the “main use” for Acrobat has moved from basic PDF generation into PDF workflows. The use of Acrobat for commenting and then updating Office documents is still relatively new, however I can agree that Acrobat offers more that just Office’s basic PDF creation.
Among some of the things it offers are:
1. Universal PDF creation – There are other common applications besides the MS Office apps. Any application that prints can benefit from Acrobat’s PDF creation facilities.
2. PDF Manipulation – Once you’ve generated a PDF, being able to remove pages, insert pages from other documents and consolidate multiple PDFs is the next logical step.
3. Universal commenting – Commenting on non-Word documents.
4. Forms – OK, so I’m a little biased here because I work in this field, I think PDF Forms are another significant value that Acrobat provides over basic PDF creation.
My experience is that generating PDFs from Office documents is, in fact, the “main use” for Acrobat, but it’s not the only use. When Office 12 comes out there will be some users who drop Acrobat because they can now generate PDF without it and there will be others who purchase it so that they can manipulate the PDFs they’ve generated with Office using Acrobat. We’ll all just have to wait and see what the net effect on Acrobat sales will be.
Regards,
Rob
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