The software on my laptop should be as easy to use as any modern-day appliance, so why can’t Adobe and Microsoft get the basics right?
Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. One downside of using your phone for edits is accidental autocorrects, which is why some of her comments may came out sounding a bit bonkers. @njkobie
Is it just me, or is software getting worse? I want my laptop to behave like my toaster or kettle: appliances that just work as expected without any thought on my behalf. But the first time I tried to open the proof of my book, with its thousands of comments, typesetting marks and the rest, Acrobat simply refused to load. (Did I mention I have a book coming out in July? Yes, I have, and I will again, no apologies.)
I had only installed the full version of Adobe Acrobat on my laptop because I was testing its new AI assistant, which is a genuinely handy tool for digging data out of documents. But I wish Adobe had spent less time on whizzy AI features and more time on getting the basics right.
Every time I wanted to reply to a comment, Acrobat had a 50/50 chance of crashing or stalling for minutes. I tried everything I could think of to make it work, including switching to my husband’s gaming laptop in case the issue was performance-related. After a full morning, I’d worked through only 20 pages, an untenable rate that would have put me on course to finish editing the proof in time for the paperback to come out.
Forum posts suggest this issue stretches back to at least 2019, so I ditched Acrobat for Nitro PDF. This opened the file just fine but ran the comments along the bottom of the page, and the mousing made for slow, wrist-killing work. I turned to the forums once more, but no luck: there’s no way to change this layout. By this point, I’d spent more time reading about PDFs than working on my own.
In a fit of paranoia, being unsure that the Nitro PDF version would show my comment replies correctly, I decided to open the file on my phone to see if it worked. And in Acrobat’s mobile app, it worked perfectly.
Not only did the file – or enough of the file for me to work with – load instantly, but the comment and reply tool was elegant and simple. I could work through the edits ten times as quickly as I could on my laptop, all without crying in frustration.
There’s probably a setting in the desktop, Windows-based version of Acrobat that would have made this PDF commenting task just as breezy. But I couldn’t find it before
