PDF Coming to Office 12

Office 12 will allow users to save documents in Adobe’s popular Portable Document Format (PDF), helping customers that have adopted PDF for archiving and document exchange by eliminating the need for third party add-ins. The move could also encourage upgrades to Office 12 and aid Microsoft in selling to governments that are opposed to using Office’s proprietary document formats. However, it could also undercut some of Microsoft’s competing document management initiatives.

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 tools to read and write PDF files by providing a complete specification and a royalty-free license. PDF viewers are free and widely available.

PDF: Customer Request and Competitive Threat

Despite the growing popularity of PDF for archiving and sharing documents, Microsoft has resisted adding PDF support to Office, preferring that customers use the native Office formats. To create a PDF file with Office 2003, users must install third-party software, such as Adobe Acrobat. These products typically work by adding a “PDF Printer” to the system, but instead of sending output to a physical printer, these “PDF Printers” create PDF files. Some products also install add-ins to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to give users the ability to create a PDF file with one click on a toolbar.