Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard Upgrade from Standard Version 4-6 (Mac) Description:

Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard Upgrade from Standard Version 4-6 (Mac) review:4 stars (A Good Reason to Upgrade) - Acrobat 7 Standard on the Mac offers nearly all the features of Acrobat 7 Professional. The windows version of Professional includes a whole extra program (livecycle designer) for creating forms and using xml data. The Mac version does not include that program.

However, Professional does offer a couple of very important features:
1) The first is building indexes of documents. Indexing is similar to a search but is much more powerful. An index is a pre-built catalog of all the words in your document, saved as a separate file. After the index is built, whenever you want to search a document, you search the index instead, and searches are almost instantaneous. Searching a regular pdf without an index is quite slow. The real power of the index comes when you index multiple pdf's at once. You could have 100 reports, or a dozen books, or whatever, pre-indexed, and any future search is very very fast. Indexing is definitely a slick feature and an impressive trick if you create content for end users or clients.

2) The other important feature is mostly for the advertising/design/print community. Acrobat Pro allows a lot of interaction with press-ready files. You can view separations, preflight documents, and chop large pages into smaller pieces and print any portion of a page you like. If you work with documents for a living, the Professional version is almost a must-have.

Finally....speed. Version 7 is still slow to load. But on a Mac you can leave your computer on for weeks at a time and just leave Acrobat running, so that's not too big of a deal. You can speed up load times by de-activating plug-ins that you don't use. If you just use Acrobat to just view documents, you don't need a lot of the plug-ins. If you use Acrobat professionally, I'd leave the plug-ins active. Do a Get Info on the Acrobat program, click open the Plug-ins tab, and you can uncheck plug-ins to deactivate. For a full description of each plug-in, look under the help menu while in Acrobat.

CONCLUSION: Great program. Good upgrade from 6. Pro version offers useful power features. Mac users a little shortchanged on forms creation.