ActiveDocs is a document management software offering from ActiveDocs.
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Flip PDF Pro for Mac
Score 5.0 out of 10
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Flip PDF for Mac from FlipBuilder is designed to make it fast and easy for Mac users to convert ordinary PDF files into mobile friendly eye-catching brochures or magazines with amazing page-flipping effect. Integrated with hundreds of templates and themes, the Mac program enables you to create an unique and impressive digital magazine, brochure or catalog within minutes.
There are not a lot of competitors to compare this product with, but ActiveDocs holds its own as a very useful software for the need. I recommend doing a demo to see how the process works, but it's rather streamlined and easy to create a template and produce a document from it.
It's great for presentations. It makes even the most drab presentation more interesting, and gives you the ability to add animated elements to your presentation. Everybody uses Microsoft PowerPoint, but for Mac it's a little slow and unresponsive. Flip PDF Pro for Mac kind of solves that issue – you can build your project in InDesign, export it out, then import it into Flip PDF Pro. It sounds like a bit of a process but it's actually very easy. Any designer can pick it up and run with it.
You can customize or add certain things like your title, logo, toolbar icon appearance, background, fonts, etc. It feels a lot like a design program – which is nice, as a designer.
The program allows you to embed almost any sort of media into your flip book – GIFs are easy to add in and work with, they add a dynamic element to your presentation (which wasn't possible before).
You can create these things called “hot spots” – basically certain trigger areas in your document that can activate something when clicked – like take you to a e-commerce site, for example.
My documents sometimes had a problem with import and output – sometimes it would take a substansial amount of time to export something.
In their mulit-lingual version, our freelance linguist caught some mistakes, some words were not translated or translated into other languages – which can make us look pretty bad.
There's a limit on audio you can output for each page in your document – it had to be "one audio for two pages".
Very good usability overall. Any user can pick this up and run with it. HotDocs, the closest competitor, has similar end-user usability, but from a designer of templates perspective, ActiveDocs definitely has the edge in this regard. I would recommend this for any company that mass produces documents from templates as deliverables.
The software overall is very excellent. It responds quickly and produces documents well. The integration with systems makes data input easy. Questions can be designed to allow further expansion of template creation/customization. The rules section is very useful for complicated If/Than/Else style templates. Although experience and training help, the software is very user-friendly out of the box.
ActiveDocs can be a considerably complex product because your use cases can be potentially endless. In our experience, when we have come across a problem or issue with the product ActiveDoc's support has always responded to our queries within 24 hours. Support is only provided via email in 95% of cases. Each year your support and maintenance includes support hours. These are used when you contact support and your issue is not found to be a bug or problem with the product (completely fair and understandable). When we've identified or discovered bugs (mainly with the latest version of Word) it is patched by the next release. They typically release about 4-5 updates per year.
In relation to other software that have a functionality similar to ActiveDocs, they don't even compare in relation to the interface, I didn't use all the software available on the market, but the ones I used and I can compare, ActiveDocs is without a doubt the best among them. We really likes the interface.
There are several PDF conversion programs out there, but really Flip PDF Pro for Mac is probably the best one that I've encountered. The amount of versatility in the program really sells it to me. It works just like a design program, but as a customizable PDF, and it's easy-to-use interface really helps speed things up with our workflow and process. There's a lot of competitors out there, but none of them really stack up.
