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Docudesk's deskPDF Professional

By Alexandra Brown | May 2, 2008
News

Law Office Management

May 2, 2008

Docudesk's deskPDF Professional

A low-cost alternative to Adobe Acrobat.


     
It seems to me I've written this song before (apologies to Sammy Cahn). I had just installed the latest version of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional (8.12 as of this writing), and-voila!-the expected Acrobat PDFMaker toolbars didn't show up in any of the Microsoft Office 2007 programs as promised. Now, one of the primary reasons I use Acrobat instead of one of its far-less-expensive competitors is that it lets you right-click on a file or folder in any file directory, select Create PDF (the toolbar button and context menu item for PDFMaker), and there's your PDF (portable document format). This is a wonderfully simple integration when it works-and it does work most of the time. I've used it for what seems like decades. No dragging and dropping, no exporting, no intermediate file formats: just one-stop PDFing.
      But not so this time. No toolbars appeared in the Microsoft Office suite. So I did what you should do in a situation like this: I went to Adobe's website (www.adobe.com), searched for toolbars outlook, and got back a long page titled "PDFMaker is unavailable in a Microsoft Office application with Acrobat (7, 8, 3D, and 3D 8 on Windows): The PDFMaker icon (Convert To Adobe PDF) and the Acrobat menu are missing from a Microsoft Office 2003, XP, or 2000 application (for example, Access, Excel, Word)." That page provided 14 different "solutions," some of them quite complicated. Fourteen? So 13 of them might not work for me? Fourteen solutions are not a solution; they're just chicken entrails. One solution is a solution.
      Why was this so familiar to me? I remembered: A year or so ago (I think), I installed a new copy of Acrobat and got the toolbar, but lost my virtual PDF printer. That feature is the core of the Acrobat program-the computer thinks creating a PDF is rather like printing out a document. In a working copy of Acrobat, you'll find Adobe PDF in the drop-down printer list of the Print dialog box. Clearly, this wasn't a working copy. I could still open Acrobat to view, edit, comment on, and print out (on paper) PDFs created by other people. I just couldn't make my own. For some reason, Acrobat 6, 7, or 8 just couldn't install the printer. I tried as many of the umpteen so-called solutions as applied, but struck out. Obviously, there must be another option.
      At the time, I tried a few of those far-less-expensive competitors. And my favorite of these is still Docudesk's deskPDF Professional (www.docudesk. com). At $29.95 it's one-fifteenth the price of Acrobat Professional ($449) and it does about half of the chores its costlier cousin does. Like Acrobat, deskPDF creates PDFs out of one or more files selected from a directory tree, and it integrates with some Microsoft Office programs and countless other Windows programs-but not Outlook.
      Like Acrobat, it lets you combine several documents, each from a different program if you wish, into one standard PDF (though it took me a while to figure out how to do that). Like Acrobat, deskPDF converts hyperlinks, bookmarks, and tables of contents from Word documents into indices for your PDF documents-all with one click on the toolbar button, or right-clicking the menu in Word. Like Acrobat, it produces fully editable PDF files, if that's what you want, or it applies 128-bit encryption to your PDFs so they can't be changed, printed out, or tampered with. And since deskPDF Pro installs as a virtual printer in Windows, it works with any Windows program, as does Acrobat. Of all the inexpensive PDF creators I tested, this one seemed to produce the sharpest, clearest rendering in the shortest time. However, it lacks Acrobat's high-powered indexing, annotation, document management, other security, and optical character recognition features. And since I couldn't figure out how to use desk-PDF to convert each of my email message folders to a PDF for archiving, I went back to Acrobat.
      As it turns out, none of Adobe's 14 suggestions fixed my problem this time either. So as a workaround, now I highlight every message in a given Outlook message folder, select File, Print, then Adobe PDF from the drop-down menu of printers. Then I click on Properties next to the drop-down box and choose my levels of security and compression, then hit the OK button. To convert any non-Outlook file, I open Acrobat, click on the Create PDF button, select the desired file or files, and watch while this venerable program crunches my documents.
     
     
#295617

Alexandra Brown

Daily Journal Staff Writer

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