[jdbrandt]

I recently installed Acrobat Professional 6.0 on my system and immediately noted a dramatic slow-down in the behavior of MS-Word, Excel and Powerpoint, particularly on startup. It was taking at least 2 to 3 minutes to start MS-Word!!

I eventually found that Acrobat had installed files in the

/Microsoft Office X/Office/Startup/[applicationname]/

directories, i.e., a file named PDFMaker.dot in the Word directory, PDFMaker.ppa in the Powerpoint directory, and PDFMaker.xla in the Excel directory. These files produce a Toolbar in the application with icons to click for PDF creation. I found that removing these files and restarting the program resolved the behavior, with Word starting up quickly as before. Since I don't particularly need to have the PDF creation toolbar in Word, I can do without the 'feature'.

The problem is that if I run Acrobat Professional, as part of its startup routine it checks its installation and re-installs the offending files. So, I'm in the situation of needing to manually remove the files each time before running an Office application if I've recently run Acrobat.

Any suggestions for how to deal with this? Is there a way to turn off 'auto re-install' within Acrobat (I haven't found one), or can I replace the files with 'dummy files' that Acrobat won't over-write?

[geekwagon]

Been through this, and pulled this thread from my bookmarks: remove pdfmaker from office

You'll probably need to make an account to read it.. I couldn't get the guest login to work when I just tried it.

[jdbrandt]

Thanks for the info, it worked.

Boy, talk about a poorly-designed interface!

[JellyBeen]

Originally posted by jdbrandt:
Thanks for the info, it worked.

Boy, talk about a poorly-designed interface!

I've had the same problem, can you just detail the fix here? There has got to be a better way than just removing the damn file everytime...thanks!!

[ThisGuy]

here is a copied selection of the text:

Does Anyone Know How to Permanently Get Rid of the Office PDFMaker?

Robby Berman - 10:00am Jun 13, 2003 Pacific

As has been discussed, removing the Acrobat 6 PDFMaker.dot file from the Office Startup folder temporarily gets rid of the toolbar, but Acrobat 6 re-installs it each time Acrobat 6 is launched. I don't need this toolbar in Word, and it's a demanding little add-in to boot.
Every time I launch a Word document, the PDFMaker toolbar moves my document down-screen to make room for itself, so I have to manually move the toolbar every time I launch Word to make room on my laptop display, for, y'know, the document I'm trying to work on.
More time-wasting is the fact that every time I save a file, Word asks me if I want to update the .dot file. (I know it's referring to the PDFMaker.dot file because when I remove it, Word stops bugging me about saving changes).
Is there some way to turn off the automatic re-install of the PDFMaker toolbar and get rid of it permanently as you could do in Acrobat 5.05? I've pored through the Acrobat Help and online resources, and I'm stuck.
Thanks for any help.


7 messages. Displaying 1 through 7.


Robby Berman - 10:59am Jun 13, 2003 Pacific (#1of 7)
Edited: 13-Jun-2003 at 12:09pm PST

Ha! I figured out a kludge myself that works.
1. Quit all Office apps and create a new folder in your Office folder, naming it anything you want. I named mine "Placebo Startup."
2. Locate your Office Startup folder. If you have Word startup items that you need, copy the Word folder to your new "Placebo Startup" folder. Obviously, you'll want to remove PDFMaker.dot from the copy. In my case, this was the only thing in my Startup folder, so I didn't need to copy anything.
3. Launch Word and open a new blank document.
4. Go to Preferences>File Locations and select Startup from the list at the right.
5. Click Modify and select your new "Placebo Startup" folder. This makes Word look here at startup, not at the folder PDFMaker's in.
6. Quit Word.
Apparently, Acrobat 6 is looking only in the default Office Startup folder to make sure PDFMaker.dot is present. I guess it's not concerned with whether or not Word is looking there, too. Thank goodness for that!
Unfortunately, this fix doesn't work for Excel or PowerPoint, which have a different method of tracking startup files.
Of course, this is a whole lot of work to go through just to turn off a feature in Acrobat 6.


Paul Herrin - 12:43pm Jun 13, 2003 Pacific (#2 of 7)

Robby, To stop Acrobat from replacing the PDFMaker component do this...
1. Remove PDFMakerLib from Applications/Microsoft Office X/PDFMakerLib (and the items in the office/startup directory). 2. Launch Acrobat, when prompted to replace missing file *deselect* the PDFMaker component and then enable "do not show repair setup again", then Continue.
Acrobat will no longer replace these files at start up, it won't prompt you to do so again. If down the road you want them back, select Help | Detect and Repair. Let me know if that works for you. Seems like you made a lot of extra work for yourself.


Robby Berman - 02:20pm Jun 13, 2003 Pacific (#3of 7)

Paul,
This is innacurate.
As noted by me and others, even checking "Do not show repair setup again" and selecting Continue does not stop Acrobat from re-adding the file. Maybe it helps in subsequent Acrobat startups, but, if you look in the Office Startup folder after that first one, PDFMaker is once again there.


pjonesCET - 03:15pm Jun 13, 2003 Pacific (#4 of 7)


Actaully there are three copies one in Word, one in Excel, one Power Point. Quit Office and use find File to locate all items associated with PDFMaker. remove these items for safe keeping somewhere away from Office files. Open Office and PDF Maker should no longer work.


Bruce Spath - 08:51pm Jun 14, 2003 Pacific (#5 of 7)

Note in Paul's reply that you need to DESELECT PDFMaker in the dialog that prompts you whether you want to repair it. If you deselect and hit continue, it will not repair PDFMaker. Judging by what people that are having trouble are posting, they're not deselecting the checkbox. To be perfectly honest, the cancel button shouldn't really be there since it only confuses the issue. (It cancels the dialog, not the repair process.)


Dennis Embry - 06:13pm Jul 6, 2003 Pacific (#6 of 7)

Paul is correct, but notice you MUST remove the PDFlib maker thing. Just removing the files from startup is not sufficient.


Mitch McCullough - 07:51am Jul 7, 2003 Pacific (#7of 7)

I did what pjones &c said to get rid of the PDF Maker and it worked. What a pain! It would be far better if this worked like other Word Tool Bars so that you could select or desect the PDF Maker, or even add it to other, existing Tool Bars. Very annoying when features add unnecessary work!

[chabig]

Is this only a problem with Acrobat Pro, or does Acrobat Standard do it too?

Chris