Acrobat 9 isn't recognizing Word 2008 structure for bookmarks

Question

Hi -- I posted the following on the Acrobat User Community Forums Sunday and got zero response.  I talked with Adobe tech support today and was encouraged to post it here.
Limping to the finish line of my voluminous PhD dissertation, broke and with just Acrobat 7, I created pdfs then found that Acrobat wasn't recognizing my Word structure for bookmarks.  I immediately reasoned it was because I had had to upgrade to Office 2008 for Mac and that I must need Acrobat 9.  So I used the remaining balance on a credit card to purchase the Acrobat 9 download, upgraded it, made a pdf of my Part 1 literature review and -- ta, da -- Acrobat 9 does not recognize my Word structure.  That is, when I go to Bookmarks and select Options menu, the option "New bookmark from structure" is not available.  My Word docs are all set up with heading styles that allow for automatic table of contents in Word.  I thought that was how it's supposed to work for creating bookmarks in pdfs.  I had created bookmarks manually for my maps and tables but, as noted, my dissertation is voluminous and so are the tables of contents -- way too long to have to input manually unless there is simply no other way.  Already way in the hole at the end of my lengthy doctoral work, it currently seems my $159 for the Acrobat 9 upgrade was all for naught.  My last expert support contract is long expired and I suppose I will have to lay out more precious bucks I don't have to get professional support for this issue.  I will be so grateful if someone on this forum can advise.
Version note:  After installing Acrobat 9 I did the upgrade that popped up, and thought it said 9.1.3.  Not prompted to, I even restarted after the upgrade, yet when I check "About Acrobat" it tells me I have version 9.0.0.
After posting the above Sunday I discovered that when I save as Acrobat 9 pdf from Word doc files, I get a pdf with the first couple pages in a separate file from the rest -- possibly split at a new section.  I wondered whether it was due to some error I might have made in Distiller while attempting to follow the confusing (for me) instructions for setting up Acrobat 9 for Mac.  While talking with the tech support fellow I saved a pdf from a docx file and it made only one pdf file like you would expect, but as previously noted, those also do not recognize my built-in Word header style structure.  I have my numerous dissertation text files saved in doc format at request of a doctoral committee member and don't want to risk having to reformat after conversion to docx just so I can make pdfs -- I'd rather just go back to using Acrobat 7 if Acrobat 9 can't read my Word structure -- the whole reason I dropped the bucks on it now, since I hope to upgrade Creative Suite ASAP, but can't afford to right now.  The tech instructed me to uninstall Acrobat 7 in case this may be the source of the problems, but I don't want to do that in case I still need to use it.  He gave me some work-arounds, including new preferences and a new user account with administrative access to see if Acrobat 9 will work properly unencumbered by Acrobat 7 on my main account.  Also I can try uninstalling and reinstalling the Acrobat 9 upgrade.  But frankly, I'm very dissappointed at the prospect of being waylaid for many more hours trying to get a product to work that doesn't seem to be living up to its claims -- at a time when I expected to be (finally) done.  Has anyone out there successfully created bookmarks from a Word 2008 for Mac style hierarchy?  Considering the time I've spent so far, I might as well have stuck with Acrobat 7 and just input the bookmarks manually.  I'm reluctant to even put more time into trying to use Acrobat 9 if I don't know for certain it's going to work, given the time I will likely have to spend ion inputting bookmarks manually.  Unfortunately, after downloading Acrobat 9 I trashed all the pdfs I'd made with Acrobat 7 to avoid confusion, so I'll even have to re-do those.  Grrrrrrrrr!  Any insights welcome.

Answer 1

The problem is also with Acrobat Help, which does not say anything about this issue in the Help info for either Acrobat 7 or 9.  Had that info been in the Acrobat 7 Help text I would not have bothered to purchase the upgrade!!!!!!  I checked Help in both versions and all it says is that if the create "new bookmark from structure" option is unavailable, your document does not contain structure, or something to that effect.  Since my documents do contain structure, I had to assume from that Help text that there was some other problem.
In short, there was no warning about this in either Help, nor in the system requirements info on the store page.  This appears to be false advertising to me.  You can see how I was fooled into purchasing the upgrade at a time when I was least able to afford it and now I'm not even using it.  I feel angry with Adobe -- not good customer relations.  Note that I live not far from their headquarters in Silicon Valley -- now I'll have to wince when I go past their headquarters in San Jose.  You think I won't forget this little sting at the end of a long doctoral process?  Makes me think again about those cheap alternatives to Creative Suite that I get notices about from Smith Micro.