Scansoft PDF Create! 2.0

Rating:
Summary: Adobe look out!
Review: I work at a legal firm and we bought this product instead of Acrobat. The pricing was unbeleiveable. Why does Adobe charge so much for the same thing? Maybe because there was no competition. This reminds me of what happened we Lexus started making luxury cars - BMW and Mercedes were forced to take notice. Isn't being a consumer in this kind of market great?

Rating:
Summary: Works well, and as advertised
Review: I'm very happy with this. This product allows you to create a pdf file from any printable document. I've used it so far with Word and Excel, and it worked very well. It also allows you to combine multiple existing pdf files into a single pdf document. It works by either "printing" to the Scansoft printer; clicking a toolbar button in MS-Office applications; or right-clicking on an existing document. There are also a number of standard and advanced settings for your documents, such as including various watermarks or changing the compression ratio.

The only annoyance is that after you install it, you must activate it online (there is a telephone option also). Without the activation, you get a watermark printed across any pdf you create. I suppose this is necessary though, since so many people pirate software. I installed it on my two computers and was able to activate both times, but I don't know what the limitations are.

I do not have experience with the Adobe Acrobat product, so I can't compare it to that. And of course, you cannot edit existing pdf files like the full version.

All in all, this product works as advertised and is reasonably priced. Five stars.

Rating:
Summary: Great alternative to Acrobat
Review: Scansoft's PDF Create 2.0 does not work with MS Word when MS Word is used as the email editor in Outlook. The PDF Create toolbar and buttons do not appear in this situation, so there is no way to create a PDF document that has links. You can still print to the PDF print driver (which is Scansoft's "solution" to this problem). But printing does not preserve heading information for creating proper PDF files that have bookmarks. Scansoft's other "solution" to this problem is to stop using MS Word as the Outlook editor.

Rating:
Summary: Does not work with MS Word!
Review: Scansoft's PDF Create 2.0 does not work with MS Word when MS Word is used as the email editor in Outlook. The PDF Create toolbar and buttons do not appear in this situation, so there is no way to create a PDF document that has links. You can still print to the PDF print driver (which is Scansoft's "solution" to this problem). But printing does not preserve heading information for creating proper PDF files that have bookmarks. Scansoft's other "solution" to this problem is to stop using MS Word as the Outlook editor.

Rating:
Summary: Great alternative to Acrobat
Review: This gives me PDF 1.5, passwords and other full-Acrobat features at a fraction of the price. I did read another review on its toolbar shortcuts in Outlook - PDF Create! and Adobe Acrobat have the identical behavior and limitation of Word is the editor for Outlook. Overall, I think the batch processing and merging of many documents into a single PDF as the best feature.