The way people use Microsoft Word largely hasn’t changed much since the product initially launched. However, since Office 2003, Microsoft Office application and Word in particular have become more integrated with other applications and the cloud.
If your usage of Microsoft Word largely hasn’t changed much in the past few years even though you and/or your employer are upgrading to Office 2010 then there are some underutilized features you might be missing but could benefit your work.
If you work with documents, you are probably awash in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) files, so one of the first apps to install on your iPad is a good PDF Reader. The list of Adobe Reader apps for the iPad is ever growing.
Even better news is that Retina Display support is dropping on some of the readers I profile in this post making the iPad even more attractive for reading PDFs. App developers are also using the latest iPad’s launch to crush bugs and tighten up user interfaces which only adds to the good news.
While you can read PDFs through iBooks, there are many great (even business class) options available for viewing and even annotating PDFs on your iPad including:
One of the technologies I’ve been waiting to advance more into the mainstream is electronic signatures. While I have a smooth process down to print out contracts and other documents that need my signature and then scan them into PDFs with my Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, I would still like to whittle down the signatory process even further. Now that EchoSign, an electronic signature solution is an Adobe acquisition, I decided to reopen my research into electronic signature options.
I am always on the lookout for a better Adobe Acrobat PDF reader for my iPad so the recent launch of the free Adobe Reader for iOS really caught my eye. It also works on the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod Touch. Considering the tense relationship that Adobe must have with Apple, they are not ignoring the iOS platform by any means, which is good for users.
The Getting Started Guide that ships with the Reader is well conceived and walks you through how to interact with PDF documents using this new reader app. In fact, I encourage technical writers with an interest in documentation for mobile apps to check out Adobe Reader for iOS for the Getting Started Guide because it shows what can be done with mobile app documentation.
Last week, Adobe launched CreatePDF for creating PDFs on the iPad and iPhone. While I am sure Adobe must have a love/hate relationship with Apple and iOS devices in particular, they are still making their presence known on the platform. It’s available for $9.99 from the App Store.
I use PDFs a lot during the course of my work so I was interested in giving the app a shot because I rely on the PDF format so much. While the iPad may never replace my laptop, I do process my fair share of email while using it.
As a technical writer, I am a believer in online collaboration. A collaboration platform includes document versioning, document security, and an audit trail that can benefit just about any organization’s document development life cycle. However, the fact that remains that too often is “Johnny can’t collaborate.” Online collaboration starts off with the best of intentions but seems to collapse like a house of cards when it hits a technical, political, or business process snag.
Platforms like SharePoint, Office 365, and productivity applications like Microsoft Office 2010 and even Adobe Acrobat enable project teams to collaborate on their documents online without having to email back and forth.
Here are some reasons why organizations can’t collaborate.
I caught the news about the recent Crimson Consulting study about Adobe Acrobat as a collaboration tool and I am not sure I agree with the survey findings. Don’r get me wrong, Acrobat is great productivity tool but despite its growing feature set it remains underutilized in many organizations that have access to it but don’t use it to its full potential.
Acrobat’s best-known mission as an electronic document format, Adobe Acrobat as both an application and file format remain misunderstood in my experience having worked with both federal and commercial clients on projects where Adobe Acrobat was available to users. Adobe Acrobat, and especially Adobe Acrobat X, is a great product. Nevertheless, it is a product that the average user doesn’t know much about past saving a Word document in PDF format.
The survey took a look at Adobe Acrobat as a productivity enhancer:
I was reshuffling some files around between Dropbox and my home office PCs over this past week and saw the number of Adobe PDFs in my Documents folder is certainly on the rise. Many people have a love/hate relationship with Adobe Acrobat for many good reasons but I’ve come to rely on the format for important documents.
As a technical writer, I consider Adobe Acrobat as to be one of my main tools and gone as far as writing articles about the product; developing and teaching a training class about how to use Acrobat for document reviews; and teaching other how to secure documents using Adobe Acrobat.
Here are the five main ways I use Adobe Acrobat right now:
I just had a total Thyroidectomy. Besides being surgery, it represents the longest engagement I’ve ever had with the medical profession. While so far I can say I’ve lucked out with my Doctors and have a positive experience as a patient at INOVA Fairfax Hospital – I knew I was in for quite the record keeping exercise between medical bills, my own research on the subject, and Doctor’s orders.
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