Acrobat and Microsoft Office 2010 Compatibility

Over the past few months, I’ve received a number of inquiries about Acrobat and Office 2010 compatibility.

Adobe Acrobat X is the first version of Acrobat to support Microsoft Office 2010.

The Acrobat 9 PDF Maker toolbars do not function or appear in Microsoft Office 2010!

Didn’t Acrobat 9 ship recently? Why doesn’t Acrobat 9 support Office 2010?

The timeline below shows that Acrobat 9 shipped two years before Office 2010.

• Acrobat 9 shipped in June 2008
• Microsoft Office 2010 shipped in June 2010
• Adobe Acrobat X shipped in November 2010

What does Adobe mean by “support for Office 2010”?

Adobe Acrobat X installs toolbars and advanced integration— called PDF Makers— into Office 2010 applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

In addition to offering one-click conversion from Office applications, the PDF Makers enable additional functions within Acrobat and Windows Explorer. In fact, Acrobat itself relies on the PDF Makers working correctly for important functions.

Can’t users just print to the PDF Print Driver?

The Adobe PDF Print driver offers basic PDF creation via the Print command.

Output from the PDF Print Driver is not functionally equivalent to that of the Adobe PDF Makers.

What will my organization miss if I do not install the Acrobat X PDF Makers?

Here are a few of the key features that will be missed using an earlier version of Acrobat with Office 2010.

• Bookmarks
• Links (Navigational links such as cross-references, table of contents, footnotes and endnotes)
• PDF Creation from Windows Explorer
• Combine multiple file types (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) into a single PDF
• Convert comments in Word, Excel and PowerPoint to PDF Comments
• Comment Routing from PDF back to Word
• Select worksheets for conversion in Excel
• Create PDF and automatically attach to email
• Tagged PDF for accessibility
• PDF/A-1A (PDF for Archiving)
• Multimedia Embedding
• Optimized conversion of PowerPoint
• Converts speaker notes from PowerPoint
• Create custom mail-merged PDF and automatically attach to email
• Manual and automatic archiving of email from Outlook and Lotus Notes

What Office 2010 applications are supported by Acrobat X?

Acrobat X installs into the standard Microsoft Office ribbon interface in supported applications:

Acrobat X offers PDF Maker integration for the following Office 2010 applications:

• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Visio (Pro only)
• Microsoft Project (Pro only)
• Microsoft Access (Pro only)
• Microsoft Publisher (Pro only)

Although many of the conversion options are common to all Office applications, some PDF maker
functions are application-specific.

Do the Acrobat PDF Makers work in Office 64-bit mode?

Yes. The Acrobat 10.1 update (June 2011) introduced 64-bit versions of the PDF Makers.

What do the Acrobat X ribbons look like in Office 2010?

Here are a few examples:

Microsoft Word 2010 PDF Maker

Microsft Excel 2010 PDF Maker

Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 PDF Maker

Microsoft Outlook 2010 PDF Maker

Microsoft Visio 2010 PDF Maker