Adobe Acrobat 7 Pro: CD / Download
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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.
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@ajstringham said:
@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.
Actually LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice have excellent Doc and Docx support. There are some advanced functions that I don't think are there yet but for most everything else they work as anticipated.
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@coliver said:
@ajstringham said:
@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.
Actually LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice have excellent Doc and Docx support. There are some advanced functions that I don't think are there yet but for most everything else they work as anticipated.
They do NOW but even if it wasn't in the past year or two, it wasn't something that was supported 5 years ago. Also, their compatibility for maintaining custom formatting is still not even close to perfect. I've seen documents opened in LibreOffice that were generated in Office 2010 or 2013 get majorly screwed up, in terms of formatting.
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It's especially noticeable with the arrangement/placement of objects. They go haywire.
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@ajstringham said:
@coliver said:
@ajstringham said:
@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.
Actually LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice have excellent Doc and Docx support. There are some advanced functions that I don't think are there yet but for most everything else they work as anticipated.
They do NOW but even if it wasn't in the past year or two, it wasn't something that was supported 5 years ago. Also, their compatibility for maintaining custom formatting is still not even close to perfect. I've seen documents opened in LibreOffice that were generated in Office 2010 or 2013 get majorly screwed up, in terms of formatting.
To be fair I've seen documents opened between versions of Office where the format was just as messed up as porting it to an OSS application. Either way though your point stands.
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@coliver said:
@ajstringham said:
@coliver said:
@ajstringham said:
@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.
Actually LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice have excellent Doc and Docx support. There are some advanced functions that I don't think are there yet but for most everything else they work as anticipated.
They do NOW but even if it wasn't in the past year or two, it wasn't something that was supported 5 years ago. Also, their compatibility for maintaining custom formatting is still not even close to perfect. I've seen documents opened in LibreOffice that were generated in Office 2010 or 2013 get majorly screwed up, in terms of formatting.
To be fair I've seen documents opened between versions of Office where the format was just as messed up as porting it to an OSS application. Either way though your point stands.
And that just solidifies my point. Documents generated in Office 2013 will open and render slightly different in Office 2010, and even more different in Office 2007. It's not perfect for cross-version compatibility, even with a DOCX. PDF doesn't have this problem.
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@ajstringham said:
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.
How does the Word Viewer not behave correctly, in this case?
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@StrongBad said:
@ajstringham said:
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.
How does the Word Viewer not behave correctly, in this case?
Probably hasn't been updated with the latest features.
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@StrongBad because Word Viewer is a totally static program. Word documents are dynamic by nature. If you can create a Word document where the form itself is locked but the fields are fillable with Word Viewer, I'll take a lot of it back. But, AFAIK, that's not how Word works.
