Adobe Systems Acrobat Professional 7.0

If you need an easier way to share and comment on documents, take a look at Adobe's Acrobat 7 Professional. The $839 program lets you create Portable Document Format (PDF) files that users of Adobe's free Reader 7 can annotate - but only if you let them.

Once you enable commenting, you'll be warned that you will lose some Acrobat functions, such as the ability to delete pages and fill out form fields. To preserve this functionality, you must save a version of the document without commenting enabled. Note: the $539 Standard version of Acrobat 7 doesn't allow you to make the mark up and comment tools available to Adobe Reader 7 users.

Version 7 enhances Acrobat's links to Microsoft Office applications, including the ability to PDF Outlook e-mail messages or entire folders.

Adobe claims that version 7 is 50 per cent faster than version 6 at creating PDF files from Office apps.

Adobe also promises launch times for Acrobat and Reader that are up to four times faster than with previous versions. I didn't notice a much speedier startup with either program on my test machine, however.