Adobe design apps vs. Microsoft Office apps

- [Voiceover] A course that talks about how to move and convert, or import, export, copy and paste various objects from one companies' suite of programs to another companies' on both Mac and Windows can get really complicated pretty quickly. So, to avoid that, I'm going to focus on a few specific programs in each of these suites offered by Adobe and Microsoft, and I want to talk to you in this video about what the scope of the course will cover, and which versions I'll be covering as well. For Adobe in the Creative Cloud, the Creative Cloud actually comes with I think 15 or 20 different programs, but I'm just going to be talking about the big three: InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, which is where I think most of the artwork that people create in Adobe CC originates from that they want to convert, or somehow get over into an Office app, or import Office assets into one of these programs. For Microsoft Office, which also comes with 8 or 9 or 10 different programs, I'm only going to focus on its big three: PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. There's one more program that we'll be talking about quite a bit, and that is Acrobat Pro. Acrobat Pro is kind of a special case because although it is from Adobe and it's part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, actually Adobe I believe sells almost as many if not more copies of Acrobat to the non-CC user, to what they call the knowledge worker. Because for the past few versions, Adobe has been aiming Acrobat at the Office user, what they call the knowledge worker, and so Acrobat Pro has a very special utility for us who are trying to convert from one format to the other, because everyone of these programs in both Office and CC can export to PDF, and from that PDF, if you open it up in Acrobat Pro, any recent vintage, you're able to do a lot of stuff with the text and the graphics inside, as I'll be bringing up again and again in various videos in this course. Now, I'll be using the latest version as of this recording called Acrobat DC, but if you happen to have Acrobat Pro XI or Acrobat Pro X, those also work just as well. If you're an X, try to move to XI. If you're an XI, try to get to DC, because each one of these versions does a better job than the previous in making clean exports and being able to edit the contents easily. By the way, just want to make sure that we are all on the same page. I'm not talking about Adobe Reader; the free utility that lets you open and comment on PDFs. I'm talking about Acrobat Pro; the program that lets you edit PDFs. It's really important to make that distinction. Now, what about the versions that I'll be covering in this course. As with all lynda.com videos, we cover the most current version as of the recording, and for Office that means Microsoft Office 365. That is the equivalent of Office 2016, by the way. The Office 365 is just the subscription version of Office 2016. So, these are essentially the same, and I'll be using Office 365 on both the Mac and Windows. Now if you are on a Mac, and you aren't all the way updated to Office 2016/365, you have, for example, Office 2011, I would say that 95% of everything I talk about will apply to you as well. Same thing for Windows. If you're still using Windows Office 2013, which a lot of people still love because 2016 or Office 365 isn't everybody's favorite version of these programs that's perfectly fine, too. I can't use those versions in the recording. I need to use the latest version. It's interesting to note by the way that Microsoft Office 365 subscribers can choose to install an earlier version whether you are a Mac user or a Windows user. If you log into your Office.com account and follow the buttons to install, you'll see an option to install previous versions. On Windows, you can choose either 2013 or Office 2016 to install, you can't have them both on the same computer. But for Macintosh, you can have both Office 2011 and Office 2016 running on the same computer, which is sometimes useful. Sometimes, PowerPoint 2011 does a better job with something than PowerPoint 2016. Now for Adobe of course, I'll be using the latest version of the Adobe Creative suite, which is now called the Creative Cloud. It's all subscription, all the time, and the latest version of Adobe CC. If you are not running the current version, if you just have for example Adobe CS6, which was the last version before they went to a subscription model, that's perfectly fine, too. I would say virtually everything I cover in this course will apply to the Creative Suite 6 as well. By the way, if you're using Adobe CC, whether you're on Mac or Windows, that program too lets you download and install previous versions of its software. You can do so right from the Creative Cloud application. And one last word that I want to mention as far as Windows versus Macintosh, I'm going to be recording most of this movie on Macintosh, but I'll be jumping into Windows to show you the Windows version of things and different options you might have in Windows I would say fairly regularly throughout the course. It's just that for logistics purposes, it's a lot easier for me to stick with one operating system for the recording, and then add in the other operating system, but I can tell you that there is no preponderance of Mac users versus Windows users who need to convert files back and forth between these two suites of programs. So, whether you're using Mac or Windows, you're in the right place.