PDF Plug-In for Office 2007

Office 2007 can export documents in Adobe’s popular Portable Document Format (PDF), eliminating the need for third-party add-ins by customers who have adopted PDF for archiving and document exchange. Export to Adobe PDF files will not be enabled in Office 2007 by default, contrary to Microsoft’s previous plans, but the feature will be available as a free plug-in from Microsoft’s site.

PDF is a file format for representing documents, including text, fonts, graphics, and layout, independently from the application that created them. PDF was developed by Adobe as part of its Acrobat line of products, but Adobe has encouraged third parties to build PDF tools by providing a complete specification and a royalty-free license. PDF viewers are free and widely available, and so the format provides a useful way to deliver formatted documents to users who lack Office or similar software.

Office is adding PDF export in response to frequent customer requests. To create PDF files with Office 2003 and earlier versions, users must have required third-party software, such as Adobe Acrobat. However, some competitors to the Office suite, including the open-source OpenOffice.org suite, already support PDF output directly and do not require any add-on software. The new PDF plug-in places Office on equal footing with these competitors.