Acrobat

[White Hart]

Does anyone have working knowledge of Adobe Acrobat? In particular, when using Acrobat, how long should it take to upload a Word.doc (100mb max inc jpg images), convert it to pdf, and be able to view/access the pdf doc from my computer.

I uploaded the doc today at 1210, and some 4.5hrs later, I'm still waiting. A 2nd doc (only 225kb) took less than 6 minutes start to finish. BTW I have chosen not to have either doc on 'open' or 'restricted' access - its for me only.

cheers for any help

[Background Noise]

Which version are you using? I've done some stuff recently using the free trial version of Acrobat 9 and it's been pretty quick. I've done the conversions through the acrobat pdf function which embeds itself within word rather than with acrobat itself running separately and 5 - 6 Mb word docs have taken seconds.

[Mornington Crescent]

That is a very big document!

I have just converted a 2 Mb (50 page) word document in Acrobat 7 and it took just under 2 minutes to appear as the finished pdf doc.

[White Hart]

its using the 'convert your doc to .pdf' option on acrobat.com (hyperlinked from Adobe Reader 9). Allows you to upload and convert a max of 5 files to .pdf free of charge.

7 hrs now, and still going!

[treadigraph]

In Word select "save as" from the "file" menu, open the "tools" sub-menu and choose "compress pictures" choosing either "print" or "screen" depending the quality you need. Then continue to save the file with a new name.

This may well reduce the file size considerably and make the upload and conversion to PDF much quicker. Same trick works with PowerPoint and I believe Excel. I encourage people to do with all their DOC and PPT files at work, saves server space.

Hope that might help.

[Shunter]

Instead of using Adobe's clunky web convertor nonsense, why not just download PDF creator?

Browse PDFCreator Files on SourceForge.net

[Background Noise]

White Hart - In that case it will also been down to the upload time for a massive document. Download and install Acrobat 9 direct from Adobe and you can use it free for 30 days. It's very good and you get all the functionality of adding bookmarks, add/remove pages etc. Very expensive to buy but well worth the trial if you have a number of documents ready to convert.

[White Hart]

many thanks to you all for the help and advice

i shall be working my way through all your suggestions over the weekend, and hopefully one of them will come up trumps!

(you can always rely on prooners!)

[Mornington Crescent]

WH

Open Office 3 (free) has a save as PDF function.

3 Meg file in 10 secs.

[batninth]

White Hart

One problem I've seen with Adobe products, like Acrobat, is that they sometimes put up a pop-up window with a dialogue box, but the box isn't set to be the front window & ends up being hidden behind whatever else is working on your PC.

If you've had enough fo waiting and have then started to shut down various programs you'll find the box after quite a few things have closed.

If I find Acrobat is taking a long time to do something, I tend to minimise everything in sight and look for the dialog box. This isn't fool proof, sometimes Acrobat just get's it proverbial knickers in a twist, but I reckon on about 9 times out of 10 I find the box hidden away behind another window.

[Lightning Mate]

For what it's worth, I agree with Shunter.

Acrobat Writer will convert a twentyish page word document into a pdf in seconds.

LM