Adobe Acrobat Toolbar Worse than Malware?

Phr3n3tik writes "Adobe Acrobat has long included a toolbar plugin to automate PDF Making from Office Products. Those who found the toolbar an eyesore, or just used it infrequently could always hide it from view. Not so in their new versions, (6, and 7 apparently.) Their new take on the PDFMaker toolbar is getting some users riled up, since it is harder to Move/Hide/Delete/Uninstall this new toolbar than many forms of malware!"

Comments

Not just 6 and 7

[SdnSeraphim]

I haven't used Acrobat 4 for quite a long time. However I cannot find a way to remove the PDF toolbar even after I have removed the software completely from my machine.

Re:Not just 6 and 7

[justforaday]

IIRC, it's the PDFMaker.dot file in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Startup.

Is this news?

[flynt]

I can remove the toolbar (Acobat Pro 6) from all the office products I just tried (only word and excel). The first link in this story is something about Visio, which is an add-on to office i think. I don't have that product, so I can't say. The other post is for office for mac osX, so I can't say there either. But the problem doesn't seem to be as big as the write-up suggests, surprised?

How to remove...

[Golgafrinchan]

Here's a page that provides instructions for how to remove the Acrobat Toolbar from Word.

Instructions

Worked for me!

OS X

[nottsp1]

Its annoying in Word 2004 for Mac.. always there in the toolbar. Also, its shit becuase if you've got Acrobat 7 installed, any pdf's you view in Safari have to open Acrobat first, no matter how many times you tell it to 'always open with preview'. Bugger.

not so simple

[infinite jester]

On OS-X, at least, it installs itself automatically when doing an Acrobat Reader installation. I had to manually uninstall it from the Internet Plug-ins folder in order to use the significantly faster Schubert PDF Browser Plugin .

how about don't install it

[michaelbuddy]

I wouldn't mess with it anyway. You can use Ghostscript. And you can used the modified primo pdf from active pdf. it's a free PDF creator.

http://www.primopdf.com

works great. one time it will ask you for personal info after you make like 25 pdfs, but you can just push the cancel button if you don't want to give them any statistical information. It appears as a printer on your computer. I use it, it's great.

Solution

[MagPulse]

Search your hard drive for "PDFMaker.dot" or probably anything else withe PDFMaker in the name. On my machine it installs it here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\STARTUP

That will get rid of it in all your Office apps including Outlook.

Here's how to turn it off:

[khrtt]

Uncheck this:

Edit>Preferences>Startup>Show Messages and automatically update

The banner goes away, and, as a bonus, if you have auto-update disabled, the stupid app stops tickling the network too.

C'mon gentlemen, this is not worth a slashdot article. Next time start your engines before flooring the pedal.

Re:Who cares?

[boarder8925]

Here's a better one:

OpenOffice.org

Just use the export-to-PDF button.

Re:Worse than malware?

[l810c]

The built in toolbars can be turned on/off, moved around and organized just how you like. Restart the program and your settings are remembered.

I actually would not mind this toolbar being there. I even used it occasionally. But this thing does not behave like all the other tool bars. Turn it off or move it, restart program and Bam, there it is right back on the top row of toolbars pushing all the others down one line and reducing my view of the document.

It is a very annoying POS, so I just uninstalled it.

Adobe on how to completely uninstall toolbar:

[TheGuano]

For Windows:
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/328399.html

For Mac:
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/329307.html

Annoying, but at least they show you how to get around the reappear/reinstall/undeletable garbage the toolbar usually subjects you to.

Former Adobe Technical Support rep here.

[Anonymous Coward]

(posting anonymously to save my ass)

This article is 100% bullshit.

If you actually search the support documents, you can find instructions for removing PDFMaker. Or, if you're doing a first-time installation, you can just do a custom installation and *gasp* tell it not to install PDFMaker to begin with!

What made version 6.0 and 7.0 annoying is the "self-heal" feature that would put the PDFMaker files back after you deleted them. However, if you use the custom install approach, the self-heal will not put PDFmaker back.

Trivia: I personally have spoken with people who either want PDFMaker gone or want it back. The latter grossly outnumber the former.

Toolbars are very easy to remove

[megalomaniacs4u]

Yes the visio version of the bar is right PITA.

The toolbars are dead easy to remove.

1. Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs
2. Find Acrobat Professional
3. Click "Change", wait a little while
4. Click "Next"
5. Make sure the modify radio button is selected and click "Next"
6. Expand "Create Adobe PDF"
7. Expand "Acrobat PDF Maker"
8. For each toolbar you want to remove click the drop-down icon and select "This feature will not be available"
9. Hit "Next"
10. Hit "Update" & wait a while...