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.
