The idea of the paperless office fell to the wayside as affordable printers made their way into homes and offices. Yet, according to Gina O'Reilly, COO of Nitro, this could be due to users never grasping the full potential of digital documents.
The company recently commissioned a study and found nearly half of the 1,000 Americans they polled have little familiarity with PDF files.
“That was a bit of a surprise to us internally ...” O'Reilly said. “Literally everyone who browses the Web today has encountered a PDF file. There’s no way to avoid them. And of course, every piece of hardware—in terms of a laptop and a desktop—comes loaded with a PDF viewer to allow users to view PDF files.”
She and the team at Nitro, a company that develops PDF viewing and editing software, have been trying to make sense of the findings. Their conclusion is that most users see and use PDF files as ways of viewing static documents, and not a tool they can use to edit and create their own documents.
Simplicity, they believe, is the answer.
