Proprietary Formats = Garbage

So a friend re edited my ebook for me. I took about 6 hours to go through the edits and try to learn from them etc. I went to create a PDF from the new version fo the Word ebook and Word hangs up. I can close it and report the error to MicroSoft, but that ends their sloppy at best customer support offering. No followup. Complete trash.

There used to be a saying around Microsoft, "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." I wonder if Adobe is today's version of Lotus. Hopefully Adobe has a fix for Acrobat in the works. - Perry Clausen

Maybe this error is my fault? So I tried to download the service pack 2 for Word, but it told me Firefox is the wrong browser. I then started up Internet Explorer and got told I was all hosed for having a firewall. Cool !

Finally got the download to work, but still couldn't create PDFs from that document. No love for me.

I can quickly make PDFs using Open Office, but for some reason it was stripping out the book index links from the Word document.

So then I try to download a trial of the newest Adobe 7.0. Of course, since I already purchased 6.0 and it is running on my computer the trial of 7.0 aborts. Uninstall 6 & try 7. It works! But only if I stripped the internal links out of the document.

After about 50 hours wasted I finally got the software to create my ebook. Gotta love the Office productivity suite & and that friendly document format!

Easy to say MiroSoft is crap here...but so is Adobe. Where is Adobe at with their support. All of their past customer complaints and answers are hidden. Support forums that are not getting indexed. You can't even view them unless you register.

Why when I search for Adobe Word plugins or Word Adobe plugins or Word Adobe Macros am I left in the cold? And just about any "Acrobat + problem" search leads you to a site other than Adobe. Is Adobe that far out of the loop? Most of their forum posts look like this:

When I convert the Word doc to a PDF, the first page footer shows in the PDF, but none of the others do. EXCEPT...When I click the Pages tab in the Navigation pane and view the thumbnails of each page, I can see the missing footers there. - C Pickrell

And most are left unanswered.

So people post their comments on other sites, like Amazon:

Our firm does over $300 Million worth of business a year. We thought that Acrobat Professional ability to create fillable forms that could be shared, updated, and filled out by clients was a blessing. We not have dozens of worthless forms. And then there's the embarrassment when a client with Acrobat 7 can't fill out a form. THINK OF THE COST!

Adobe's site doesn't even mention the issue (although, their site search and help system is so poor that it may be their somewhere - who knows.)

At first, I thought I was doing something wrong. But, when I called support I was told that forms were not compatible. The service person then told me that she thought there might be a fix. However, without a service plan we'd have to pay to talk to Technical Support. We paid good money for this software (we buy multiple licenses) and only had this version for two days.

Considering the magnitude of this issue. I'm guessing there are other major problems with this release of Acrobat..

Adobe should fire its entire staff of software developers and the arrogant managers who let this software hit the market without providing fully functional compatibility.

I don't get how companies can sell so much expensive software and have customer support that is that bad.

I didn't think that much of it when Google announced their toolbar budling with Sun, but I really hope they push Open Office hard enough to kill the proprietary formats. I will be happy when they are either killed off or forced to open up.

My productivity software, like a proprietary format, is pure garbage.