Products
Product: Adobe Acrobat X Professional
2/1/2011 By:
www.adobe.com Retail price: Acrobat X Pro, $199 (retail); Acrobat X Pro
Student and Teacher Edition, $119
With the new version of Adobe Acrobat X, faculty, administration,
and students across districts can collaborate,
increase productivity, and share their work.
Quality and Effectiveness: With Acrobat X Pro, users
can delete pages from a PDF, extract pages for use elsewhere,
and replace pages with other pages. Users can also
split a single document into many smaller documents based
on page count or file size.
Ease of Use: A user-friendly Welcome screen displays
when the program is launched and provides
one-click access to recently opened PDF
files or step-by-step directions for popular
Acrobat tasks. When a user opens a
PDF document, the program’s new, streamlined
user interface displays commonly
used Acrobat tools in a special Tools pane
down the right side of the screen. Tools are
grouped by category, and every category
consists of task-related panels that can be
hidden or displayed as needed.
Creative Use of Technology: Acrobat
Pro enables users to upload and share
PDF and other files by using the program’s
Share/SendNow Online option or by
attaching a PDF file to an email message. A Review Panel
in the Comment Tool pane lets users prepare a document
for comments from others using Adobe.com. A Collaborate
Live option lets you invite others with Adobe IDs to join a
chat session and collaborate on a particular PDF document.
With the Track Reviews feature, you can send a PDF file
to others and collect their comments. Acrobat Pro X also
lets users quickly convert a PDF portfolio composed of several PDF files, files compatible
with Adobe Flash
Player, and Microsoft Office
files into one presentationstyle
document. With a PDF
portfolio, viewers can easily
preview the first page or
screen of component files
without opening them in the
application that was used to create them.
Suitability for Use in a School Environment:
Acrobat Pro X is a program for administrators and teachers
as well as students. It has tools that each of these stakeholders
may find useful. Administrators, for example, will
appreciate the Action Wizard that lets them archive important
documents. Teachers and SPED personnel will like the
Create Accessible PDF Action Wizard, which prompts them
to add a document description, insert bookmarks, and provide
alternative text for images and figures.
Top Features
¦ Easily converts Web pages to PDF
format while retaining the hyperlinks for
quick access to linked pages.
¦ Lets users create, modify, share, and
collaborate on PDF documents, forms,
multi-document portfolios, and more.
¦ Multiple Save options allow users to
save a document as an image (JPEG,
TIFF, or PNG), Word .doc or .docx,
Excel .xls or .xlsx, Web page (HTML),
RTF, and others.
Overall Rating
Acrobat Pro earns an A+ for its Getting Started projects,
which guide users through tasks like creating a portfolio,
combining files into a single PDF, and creating a PDF
form. It also gets high marks for its ability to export
documents in Word- and Excel-compatible formats
with page layout elements intact. And thanks to its new
browser toolbar, it’s now easier to convert Web pages
into PDF files with links still live.
—Carol S. Holzberg