Essential piece of software (Adobe Acrobat Reader)

Member Name: Asylum

Product:	Adobe Acrobat Reader
Date:	03/10/02 (95 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: free, runs in background, opens all PDF files

Disadvantages: none

Due to the wide variety of Word processors available such as Microsoft Word, Lotus 123 or Corel Wordperfect, it is not always possible to read a document which was written on a different computer. Imagine compiling a document in Microsoft Word and passing it to a friend on a floppy disk only to find that they are using Lotus Smartsuite or some other office program. Of course you could always download a free copy of Word reader from the Microsoft site, but how many such programs would you require?
There are many instances in which the average computer user would need to read documents from other sources, the most common being instruction manuals and guides supplied on CD with a new piece of hardware such as a printer or digital camera. It is also a common medium by which companies offer manuals or documents for download from their website.
This problem was solved some time ago with the development of PDF which stands for Portable Document Format. A PDF file can be read on any system by using Adobe Acrobat Reader, and is a generally accepted format for manuals and many other documents. Most hardware manufacturers provide a copy of acrobat reader on the CD which contains the manuals, although it can easily be downloaded free from the Adobe website.
Once installed, the program can be completely forgotten or ignored because it will run automatically in the background. Simply open a PDF file and acrobat will display it for you.
If you do not already have acrobat reader on your system then I recommend that you download the latest version now. Otherwise you may find an earlier version is installed on your system the first time that you add new hardware and insert the driver and manual CD.

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