Adobe and Office Software questions

3 years ago when I bought my laptop, I got Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 and Adobe Premier Elements 4. I've used Photoshop plenty of times for simple things such as saving scans as PDFs and small editing of images. The only downside is scans are typically huge is size, one 8.5x11 can easily take 10MBs. As for Premier, I only used it once (since it was terrible) trying to make a video of screenshots and audio that was 2min long and it took forever to render and ate 5GBs.

Now from my college, I can get Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 & Premier Elements 9 for $107. Is it worth buying? Do you recomend different software, especially for videos?

Another adobe software I'm thinking of is Acrobat Pro which they have for $57. I've created PDFs before but had to result to how Word can create them or compile everything in Publisher to do so. Is this program worth getting?

Now on the Microsoft side of things I bought Office 2007 Enterprise from my college 3 years ago and now they offer Office 2010 Professional Plus for $65. I don't use Groove from '07 but '10 includes Sharepoint which I know has functionality with Office 2010 Mobile on my Windows Phone. Is the 2007 to 2010 upgrade worth it.

Last, I have a question on Visio Professional 2010 which they offer for $66. I'm not quite sure what it is. One of my classmates and my mom said it was great for flowcharts and timelines, etc. What are your experiences with it? Would you recomend getting this software? In two years I start my senior year design project which is a year long effort (for Aerospace Engineering), if this software is good for planning design projects, would you recomend it?

I appreciate all the input! Thanks!

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None of these have trial or demo?

 

I'm also an aerospace engineering student at Embry-Riddle in the middle of my design project; this semester will be my last semester.

As for Office, Office 2010 is great, but my only complaint is that since my school still uses 2007 there were times where I had compatibility issues with integrating my presentations with that of my design team. The most notable problem were equations: PPT 2010 has better support for equations than 2007, so whenever I would load them into 2007 they would look screwed up.

Visio is a cool software. It's primarily for schematics like electrical circuits, flow charts, layout drawings, etc. Honestly though as an aerospace engineer I don't use it that much. If you're going to get any program I would get Project. Project is a biggie for any person with an engineering job. I use Project a ton at school for my design project and with my work at Boeing.

The only thing worthwhile with Adobe acrobat pro is being able to edit PDF's straight from adobe. Office 2007 and 2010 support saving as PDF, but if you ever have to make a change to the PDF file you would have to go back to office, make the change and resave. I was able to get a hold of adobe Acrobat pro 9 through my work, but honestly, with Office 2010 I definitely could live without needing adobe acrobat pro.

I can't really comment on the adobe photo/video editing software since I don't really use that kind of stuff that much. Hope this helped though!

 

Thanks for the comment.

I found a trial of Acrobat Pro and the Elements programs on Adobe's site. I found the Elements programs to be terrible. As for Acrobat, I could have used that recently with the ability to combine files into a PDF. When trying to re-enter my school from a leave of absence, I had to petition for re-entry. To speed up the process, I emailed them my petition which was a combination of PDF's, Scanned Documents, Word Documents, Excel Worksheets. In order to make one document, I spent hours scanning images, using the snipping tool, and even trying other digital means to get the lowest file size and greatest print quality into one PDF which I used Publisher to compile and publish to PDF. I do love the publish to PDF in Office 2007. However, if I had Acrobat, I could have saved about 4 hours doing all of that by just using the combine files/folders into PDF feature. I think I'm definitely going to buy Office 2010 and Acrobat Pro. However, Project is offered for $116. I may just wait a bit on the Visio/Project software. As for photo editing, I think I may just continue to use Photoshop Elements 6.