Adobe Acrobat 7 Pro: CD / Download
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@ajstringham said:
No, and that's true. Most people don't need Acrobat, they need Reader. However, almost no one who needs Word could get by with Word Reader.
This is, again, irrelevant. Anyone who needs Word will already have it and the point is moot. Anyone who doesn't need it can get the free reader.
The only difference here between Word and PDF tools is that most people have Word and only a few need the Viewer. And few people have a PDF editor and most need the free Reader.
You are attempting misdirection to make Word look expensive when it is free or costly for reasons not relevant to the conversation. However, if most people need Word, doesn't that make it ridiculous to then pay for Acrobat to do the same job that Word already does since nearly everyone already has Word?
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@ajstringham said:
Then why was everyone still saving everything in the DOC format, even with Office 2007?
Because end users dislike change and most people were still running 2003 or earlier. So they were providing backwards compatibility.
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@ajstringham said:
Because DOCX was brand new and most people weren't on Office 2007, which wasn't very popular, so for compatibility reasons people stuck with the DOC format until Office 2010 became the new standard.
Right, but that doesn't change what Office's standard was and that it was supported outside of Word almost immediately.
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@ajstringham said:
Because most people don't need to edit PDFs (filling a fillable PDF is not editing it) but almost everyone who needs Word needs ALL of Word, not just the reader.
How is this relevant and not purely an attempt at logical misdirection? Why does this matter that Word is already prevalent? Isn't that in favor of Word, not Adobe?
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@StrongBad said:
@ajstringham said:
Because DOCX was brand new and most people weren't on Office 2007, which wasn't very popular, so for compatibility reasons people stuck with the DOC format until Office 2010 became the new standard.
Right, but that doesn't change what Office's standard was and that it was supported outside of Word almost immediately.
Far from it. I remember taking a look at LibreOffice after Office 2010 had been out for 6 months to a year, and they still didn't support DOCX. Your idea that it was supported from the gate is not correct.
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@StrongBad said:
@ajstringham said:
Because most people don't need to edit PDFs (filling a fillable PDF is not editing it) but almost everyone who needs Word needs ALL of Word, not just the reader.
How is this relevant and not purely an attempt at logical misdirection? Why does this matter that Word is already prevalent? Isn't that in favor of Word, not Adobe?
Also consider that businesses interact with people outside of other businesses, namely, consumers. There are plenty of users that don't have Word and don't know about LibreOffice. Adobe Reader is free, though. People get forms from the government or another business. They can't use Word because that assumes everyone has access to Word, which is not free. However, PDF readers are free, and easily available.
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@ajstringham OpenOffice 3.0 had support and that was Oct, 2008. Dont' know if support existed before that, but it was in that release. Probably it was what pushed it to the 3.0.
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@StrongBad said:
@ajstringham OpenOffice 3.0 had support and that was Oct, 2008. Dont' know if support existed before that, but it was in that release. Probably it was what pushed it to the 3.0.
I was using OpenOffice at that point. Pretty sure it didn't.
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I was using DOCX in 2007. But I did very little on MS Word, still don't do much. So I'm not a good gauge.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I was using DOCX in 2007. But I did very little on MS Word, still don't do much. So I'm not a good gauge.
Yes, but for the sake of compatibility, people were almost exclusively using DOC.
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I think both Word and Acrobat probably work pretty well for this. I think AJ is correct, PDF is the more broadly accepted format but Word has incredibly broad support too, it's not like it is poorly supported and not widely used. People are mostly used to forms in PDFs though, at this point.
If you are a firm that has Word already, though, I would be pretty tempted to go to all Word for form creation and make whatever format makes sense. Word if you have Word users, PDF if you don't. Since both MS Office and LibreOffice can make PDF forms natively, it's a cheap alternative for the OP.
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@ajstringham said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I was using DOCX in 2007. But I did very little on MS Word, still don't do much. So I'm not a good gauge.
Yes, but for the sake of compatibility, people were almost exclusively using DOC.
Yes, lots of people did. But even in 2007 you had to change a setting in Word to make it save that way by default.
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Is there a free Word Viewer for non-Windows platforms? There probably is for Mac but I don't know that for sure.
On Linux or other UNIX, is there anything except for PDF that is universal like this? I think that non-Windows and non-Mac users might be the definitive user case here that if you don't know what platform is available then PDF still works while Word would get pretty tricky to use for forms (but not to read) on UNIX unless there is some Word form tool on UNIX of which I am unaware.
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@StrongBad said:
@ajstringham said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I was using DOCX in 2007. But I did very little on MS Word, still don't do much. So I'm not a good gauge.
Yes, but for the sake of compatibility, people were almost exclusively using DOC.
Yes, lots of people did. But even in 2007 you had to change a setting in Word to make it save that way by default.
Yeah, because Microsoft was pushing their new X format. XLSX, DOCX, PPTX, etc. That being said, it was not widely used until businesses as a whole moved to a newer Office version, which didn't happen until Office 2010. If you generated something for in-house, and you'd moved the company onto Office 2007, sure, you probably used DOCX. However, until 2010/2011, if you were sending that outside of your organization, it always went out as a DOC, unless you knew your recipient had a newer Office version.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Is there a free Word Viewer for non-Windows platforms? There probably is for Mac but I don't know that for sure.
On Linux or other UNIX, is there anything except for PDF that is universal like this? I think that non-Windows and non-Mac users might be the definitive user case here that if you don't know what platform is available then PDF still works while Word would get pretty tricky to use for forms (but not to read) on UNIX unless there is some Word form tool on UNIX of which I am unaware.
This is another great point. Other platforms. PDF is like the USB of document formats. It goes everywhere and everyone can read it. Word isn't at that level, even as prolific as it is.
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@StrongBad I get where you're coming from. I do. You see it as wasteful and foolish to do part in Word and part in Adobe, when you feel Word could do it all on its own. But the fact is PDF is the golden standard. It's Portable Document Format for a reason...
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Since a form is a static or "terminal" document, PDF would seem to make the most sense. If the form was being edited, that would be different.
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I think that you can use LibreOffice on Linux to fill in Word forms, but I am not sure.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Since a form is a static or "terminal" document, PDF would seem to make the most sense. If the form was being edited, that would be different.
Exactly. But being filled in is not being edited. That's why you create fillable PDFs.
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@StrongBad said:
I think that you can use LibreOffice on Linux to fill in Word forms, but I am not sure.
And this right here is a very nice reason why Word DOC/DOCX will never be the standard form. Either the person has to have paid software for you to guarantee it will work, or your are relying on free software to be able to pull it off, and without an equivalent to Adobe Reader but for Word documents, businesses, government, etc will never do that.
