Acrobat Annoyances Part 1
Look, I am a big fan of Acrobat, so please don’t take the following as Adobe or Acrobat bashing. But as an everyday user, there are some things I wish Acrobat did differently. Also, let me point out that unlike the people who wrote Word Annoyances I don’t have enough complaints to make up an entire book!
Number 1 on my list of Acrobat Annoyances is the absence of a preference for Save or File | Open options like Microsoft has for Word for Windows.
Why? Because Acrobat always defaults to My Documents for saving or opening. Personally, I hardly ever want to save a PDF in My Documents. Like most professionals, I want to save (or retrieve) PDFs from a network drive that gets backed up regularly.
Let me give you an example. This morning I opened a PDF buried deep inside a network drive. I extracted some pages and clicked on the Acrobat Save icon. Did Acrobat offer to save the file in the folder I had painstakingly navigated to?
Heck, no. Acrobat presented the Save dialog box inside of My Documents. I had to painfully retrace my steps on the network drive to save the extracted pages in the same folder as the source document. (My work around is to create shortcuts to frequently-used folders in My Documents exclusively for use in Acrobat.)
When I have complained about this behavior in the past, the response from Adobe is that Acrobat relies on the operating system for default opening and saving locations, which is my case is WindowsXP.
Let me say in reply that Microsoft recognizes this is a problem because it gives Word users a preferences setting. Please see the screen shot of the Preferences settings in Word 2007 below for an example. I also manage some software projects and know that adding this functionality is not a huge deal.
Am I just easily annoyed, or does always having to navigate out of My Documents bug anyone else?
