Saving PDF files from Office 2007
I know that this is the oldest trick in the book, but I am surprised from time to time at how people don’t know about it much. You can save a document as PDF from all of the Office 2007 applications. There are many times when people are installing utilities such as Primo PDF for converting their office documents to PDF.
Take a look at the screenshot below:
Yes, above is the Save As menu in Word 2007 on my computer, and it has a save as PDF option. If your Word installation doesn’t have one. it is because this option is not available by default (courtesy an objection raised by Adobe).
All you have to do to make this option available, is go to this Microsoft link, and download and install the Office Add-in found on this page. Now, the moment you have installed this, you will see the same menu option above.
Now simply go ahead and save any office document as a PDF file. I do this all the time and the results are usually very good.
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March 12th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Well, I have had this feature on from the start, knew about it, but hardly use it. That’s because I normally use Cute-PDF, a free pdf printer already installed on my PC. As you know, this printer lets you convert to pdf from any application, be it office or even paint or SAP – as you long as you can print, you can pdf… so even if you dont have office 2007, you are not dependent on upgrading yet..
March 13th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Of course, but most people don’t need to make PDFs from SAP or Paint
Yet, I have seen a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to create PDF documents (typically reports, proposals, etc.)
And for that it is perfect. I use Primo PDF as well for printing PDFs from other applications. However from Office its much simpler to just save as PDF.
March 13th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Okay lambu, so I downloaded and tried Primo as well – the quality of the pdf is nowhere close to what I got from Cute – so you may want to try it too in case you need a secondry pdf printer.. of course, that is if you don’t need to password protect your pdf file (cute doest let you do that), but neither does the Office 2007 add-on…
March 13th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Thanks for your passion. But my needs are more than fulfilled through the office extension. I usually use PrimoPDF when printing from the browser. Quality is not so big on a criteria here.
March 26th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
There is however an advantage to printing the PDF using the addon, which is that it preserves all the cross references within the document which are lost in CUTE PDF.
March 27th, 2009 at 4:19 am
I knew I was missing something
. Thanks Tarun.