Adobe Acrobat 7 Pro: CD / Download
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@StrongBad said:
@ajstringham said:
Yes, LibreOffice could always edit .DOC, but NOT DOCX. DOCX is a more recent development, being the past year or two.
I think there is little point to this conversation. Obviously you are not familiar with Word and are just making things up. DOCX became the standard format of Word in 2007, that's seven years ago. Word 2007, 2010 and 2013 all had it as the primary file format. LibreOffice has had it since 2007 as well as OpenOffice added the feature sometime at or before the 3.0 release which is ancient by now.
Where are you getting these ideas from?
When Office 2007 hit the market, DOCX was not made the standard. That really didn't happen until Office 2010 flooded the market. LibreOffice has not really handled DOCX until more recent times, and when they first said you could open and read a DOCX, if you generated something in Word and saved it as DOCX and then opened it in LibreOffice, the formatting was all kinds of screwy.
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@StrongBad said:
@ajstringham said:
Besides, PDF readers are free....
As are Word readers. This is why I think you are just making everything up to make a point that makes no sense.
Exactly, but a Word reader and a PDF reader are not apples to apples.
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@ajstringham said:
When Office 2007 hit the market, DOCX was not made the standard.
Yes, it was. -
@ajstringham said:
Exactly, but a Word reader and a PDF reader are not apples to apples.
In what way?
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@StrongBad said:
@ajstringham said:
There are computers at companies that don't have Word, and what happens when that happens?
There are computers without Reader. Lacking Reader is just as much as issue as lacking the Word Reader. Lacking Reader doesn't force you to buy Acrobat.
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.
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@StrongBad said:
@ajstringham said:
When Office 2007 hit the market, DOCX was not made the standard.
Yes, it was.Then why was everyone still saving everything in the DOC format, even with Office 2007? Why? 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.
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@StrongBad said:
@ajstringham said:
Exactly, but a Word reader and a PDF reader are not apples to apples.
In what way?
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.
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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.
