A self-indulgent rant about software with a happy ending

Last night I volunteered to convert a couple of documents to PDF for a friend.

‘It'll be easy’, I thought, ‘it'll only take a few minutes’.

The phrase "Ha" comes to mind.

Adobe Acrobat can't import DOCX files. This wasn't a huge surprise and I was prepared.

One a quick trip to Pages later and … one document came out blank while the other was so badly misaligned that it was unusable.

‘Never mind’, thought I, ‘there are other options’.

OpenOffice rendered both DOCX files as blank. This was not progress.

‘Fine, fine, let's see what MS Office is like these days’.

There was a free trial of the upcoming Office for Mac available. A 2.5GB download later and I had a file which would, when double clicked, make an icon appear in the dock for about two seconds before quitting.

At this point, I admit I was getting frustrated.

Off to Office 365 I went. I'd even have gone so far as to give Microsoft my £5.95 for a month of access to it, if they'd let me login. I was presented with a blank page after entering my Live credentials.

I got the same result after switching web browser to one that wasn't laden down with the features that make the WWW bearable.

Did Microsoft not want my money?

(The more I deal with DOCX, the less I like it).

By this point, it was past midnight, I was running out of options, and I didn't want to let my friend down.

Then I found the rather wonderful convertonelinefree.com (Gosh, this paragraph looks a bit spammy, it isn't though.) and I had the DOCX files converted a minute later.

So time to talk about Adobe software… in a blog post where I've been ranting about software. Brace yourselves…

I really like Acrobat CC. (Has the sky fallen? No? OK, then. Let us continue.)

I don't know what someone who has used earlier versions a lot will think of the dramatic UI changes, but as an occasional user, it is really rather nice.

It combined my two files without a hitch and did a near perfect job of identifying all the form fields I wanted to be editable.

The step-by-step UI is rather nice and makes it easy to find the various tools to edit the document.