News

Microsoft Ships PDF Add-In for Office 2007

Users who have wanted to save Microsoft Office documents in Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) were frustrated earlier this year when Redmond announced it would not include the capability as a native function in Office 2007 as it had previously announced.

Now, Microsoft has announced it is shipping the capability as a free downloadable add-in for Office 2007. In fact, the add-in enables users to save in either PDF or in Microsoft's proprietary Office XML Paper Specification (XPS).

Microsoft had initially planned to ship the native PDF capability built into Office 2007. However, complaints from Adobe prompted the company to pull back from those plans in June.

The add-in works with the 2007 versions of Access, Excel, InfoPath, OneNote, PowerPoint, Publisher, Visio, and Word, the company said in online statements. Besides saving and exporting documents in PDF and XPS formats, a subset of those programs will also support sending the formats as e-mail attachments.

The free download is available here.

About the Author

Stuart J. Johnston has covered technology, especially Microsoft, since February 1988 for InfoWorld, Computerworld, Information Week, and PC World, as well as for Enterprise Developer, XML & Web Services, and .NET magazines.