Acrobat 7 vs Acrobat 6

I have suggested that PDF files should be the primary file format for a paperless office. In most cases PDF files look like the orginals and the can be searchable. Even though there are numerous programs that can create PDF files, I still recommend using Acrobat for the paperless office.

Adobe recently came out with Acrobat 7. How much better is it than Acrobat 6? I have a detailed discussion about this in the most recent issue of the Denver Tax Paperless Office Letter (See the link on the right side of this blog.). Computer magazines have been impressed with Acrobat 7.0's speed. Some of this is an illusion and in many cases Acrobat 7 is faster than Acrobat 6. This is critical to the efficiency of a paperless office.

The illusion is the fact that Acrobat 7 starts quite a bit faster than Acrobat 6. This gives you a great first impression. In practice, you are going to start Acrobat soon after starting your computer, and you will keep it running until it is time to turn the computer off. For some, that would be once a day. For others, it might be as long as once a week.

The place where Acrobat 7 is faster than Acrobat 6 is in turning small source files into PDF files. I also noticed that for some large source files, Acrobat 6 is significantly faster than Acrobat 7! However, for most paperless offices you will be turning small source documents, like a letter in MS Word or a spread sheet, into a PDF file.

I recommend upgrading to Acrobat 7 for the reasons mentioned above.

Stay tuned! In a future blog I will give you a hint on how to make Acrobat 6 and Acrobat 7 work quicker.