Office 12 will have Native PDF support (or, rather, no...)

Steven Sinofsky (SVP, Office) announced Saturday that Office 12 will have native PDF support.

UPDATE June 2006 - Adobe's pressured them to remove it from the product; it will hopefully be available as a free download.

Sure, there are plenty of /. style comments to be made on how most users would have ranked this feature a little higher than Clippy in the Office roadmap, and that the free OpenOffice has supported PDF for a while now. Sure enough, /. picked this up and the original announcement post has plenty of slasher angst-ridden comments.

I'm just happy to see this feature included. Office 12 is really shaping up to be a significant upgrade, which is hard to do with version 12 of anything.

I'd like to see PowerPoint export of SWF, as OO does.

In the meantime, there are plenty of free options for creating PDF's from Office[1]:

  • I use PrimoPDF, a free PDF print driver
  • CutePDF uses the opensource GhostScript (a pdf suite of tools), You do not need to install Ghostscript
  • PDFCreator is an open source option

Got a PDF alternative you'd like to recommend?

[1] from Don Good - thanks!

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