Adobe Acrobat Pro is available on a yearly subscription basis for any University employee who requires it to perform their University job duties. The annual fee on a per-user basis for this access is the responsibility of the employee's department.
Most personnel who work with PDFs can do everything they need using other applications that are free or are provided to all University employees. Before you request an Adobe Acrobat Pro account for you, please refer to this table to see if your University business needs can be met with another application that you may already have installed.
If you believe that you do require Adobe Acrobat Pro, please work with your department to request a quote from our Adobe Reseller on your behalf. Once a license has procured for you please submit request to have the software installed onto your University-provided computer.
- Adobe Reader is a free PDF reader available from Adobe. This can be installed
- Apple Preview is a PDF reader for Macintosh that is part of macOS.
- Microsoft Word Online can open PDF files uploaded to your OneDrive.
- Microsoft Word for Desktop can open PDF documents and can edit most simple PDF files.
- PDFGear is a free PDF editing software comparable to Adobe Acrobat Pro.
| I Need To... |
Acrobat Reader |
Apple Preview |
Microsoft Word |
PDFGear |
Acrobat Pro |
| Open/read PDF documents |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Add comments and markups to PDFs |
yes [1] |
yes [1] |
yes [2] |
yes |
yes |
| Fill in PDF forms |
yes |
yes |
|
yes |
yes |
| Electronically sign PDFs |
yes |
yes |
|
yes |
yes |
| Unlock encrypted PDFs |
yes |
yes |
|
yes |
yes |
| Combine multiple PDFs into a single PDF |
|
yes |
yes [2] |
yes |
yes |
| Create PDFs |
|
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Convert Microsoft Word documents to PDF format |
|
|
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Convert PDF documents to Microsoft Word format |
|
|
yes [3] |
yes |
yes |
| Edit text/layout of a PDF without converting it to another format |
|
|
|
yes |
yes |
| Create fillable PDF forms |
|
|
|
yes |
yes |
| Use built-in OCR to convert scanned text to editable text |
|
|
|
yes |
yes |
| Encrypt or password-protect a PDF |
|
|
|
yes |
yes |
| Use Adobe's online collaboration tools with PDFs |
|
|
|
|
yes |
Table Notes
- The person creating the PDF must enable commenting.
- Requires converting the PDF to MS Word format, then back to PDF when finished editing.
- This works well with simple documents, but complex formatting and layout elements may not convert accurately.