For Office 2007 Microsoft had been planning to add the ability to output documents to PDF files. Unfortunately Adobe got a bit upset and claimed that Microsoft were in breach of their license to use the PDF format. To avoid costly legal battles Microsoft have agreed to remove the ability for Office 2007 to save to PDF natively, and instead provide the functionality as a plug-in, which Adobe are happy for them to do. So if you have Office 2007 you can download the plug-in for free here.
But what if you aren’t fortunate enough to own a copy of Office 2007 and don’t want to shell out for the upgrade? Well for several years I’ve been using an excellent tool called Win2PDF. It installs itself as a print driver which means you can “print” to PDF from any Windows application. So in Word, for example, you just select File/Print As, choose the Win2PDF driver, enter a filename and you end up with a PDF version of your document. Win2PDF is only $35. I’ve been using it for years and have certainly had value for money from it. And it’s an awful lot cheaper than an Office upgrade too.
You can download a trial version from http://www.win2pdf.com.
Related posts:
Or…. you can download a free copy of PDFill PDF Writer. Sounds like it performs the same task the same way as Win2PDF but its free. I’ve been using it personnally for a couple of years plus I have it installed on about 60 work computers (winNT 4.0, Win 2000 and WinXP Pro) and it has performed flawlessly. It requires an installation of GhostScript which is an opensource project from the University of Wisconsin and is also free.
The same website has a PDF Editor for $20. I’ve never used it and so I can’t comment.
The website: http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_writer.html
Later,
Dick
For years I have been using PDF995 which only costs $9.95 (source for the name). Available at pdf995.com.
They also have a utility that allows you to create a special PDF conversion folder. Saving to this folder, or dragging to the folder with Explore, automatically converts the source file into a PDF file. Just drag/save, no need to print. Eg. if you save from Word into that folder it will become FileName.pdf vs. FileName.doc