Acrobat 8.1 Professional for Windows user reviews

Pros Making forms, to a small degree. Perhaps greater security

Cons Slow, expensive, convoluted mess. Best features over-engineered to the point of being useless.

Summary What can Adobe possibly be thinking? Seriously, just who are they designing Acrobat Professional for?

The CNET review is essentially correct: use the Reader to view PDFs and software like Open Office to create them. The usefulness of Acrobat Professional is small and diminishing with each upgrade.

Version 8 is decided NOT more intuitive than Acrobat 7, not that 7 was all that intuitive. I’ve been using Acrobat since is was invented and Pro version 8 crosses my eyes. The forms function is somewhat improved, although you will still create forms manually half of the time. Maybe security is better. So what. If your data is that sensitive, you have other protocols in place.

Acrobat Professional used to be a product that would provide document creators--writers, editors, graphic designers--a convenient way to e-mail, comment on, and finalize drafts. That process is now so painful that we’re back to step one: using PDFs to transmit information digitally, and nothing else.

Using the commenting feature, either entering or viewing, is grossly cumbersome. Now we’re going back to commenting in separate Word documents with references to the PDF.

As far as coping text, tables, or graphics, I’ve never seen software regress so profoundly. If we need to copy and edit part or all of a document, we’ll use OCR programs, even for small segments.

In addition:
Many of the features included in the program are silly and useless.
Dialog boxes sometimes open partially off screen and cannot be scrolled through. Sigh.
And, of course, version 8 is even slower than version 7, which was slower than version 6, etc.

There’s more, but we’ve stopped testing because there’s no point. Needless to say, we are not upgrading corporate wide, and after many years we are looking for alternatives. Adobe has thoughtlessly engineered Acrobat Professional if not to death, then certainly close to it.

Pros functional

Cons no overwrite

Summary acrobat is a must-have for anyone who creates or edits written business materials. it's good for cranking down high-quality documents, though i do wish it allowed for over-writes in custom fonts. there are several inexpensive third-party products that will "learn" a custom font, but reproduces the overwrites in a low quality.
nothing flashy or exciting, but it gets the job done & is easy to use.