Adobe Acrobat 7.0

I attended a seminar today that introduced Adobe Acrobat 7.0, the latest version of the program that creates the PDF documents that we've started using so often on our website. PDF stands for "portable document format." The idea is to make the "reader" part of the program freely available to anyone who want to use it. Many have, since more than 750 million people across the globe have downloaded it. To create a PDF file, you need the full program (which is certainly not free). With Acrobat, you're able to take a document in almost any format (Word, Excel, or an image of some type) and, by one click of your mouse, make it a PDF document. This is the format we use to present our monthly sales and foreclosure reports (coming soon for January) and the 1951-1975 Grantor Index on CD. But we're only scratching the surface of the capabilities of this program. Today's seminar, at New Horizons (a national computer instruction company) in Waltham was taught by Mark Sawyer, a former newsman at the old WLLH radio station in Lowell. Mark did a great job. He not only introduced the product, he inspired those in the class to imagine all the possible uses for it in the work flow of our respective offices. I certainly did. You'll be hearing more about that in the near future.