Office "12" supports "Save As PDF"

I didn't know about that, but Office Online receives over 120,000 queries per month requesting the ability to "save as PDF" in Office! Microsoft has LISTENED to customers and has an answer for a common need. Steven Sinofsky announced this weekend at the MVP Summit another great feature provided by Office "12:"

"Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, InfoPath, Publisher, Visio, Project, and OneNote – will provide the capability to save documents in the PDF format, which will include a fixed layout representation of the document. PDF documents created by Office “12” may contain live hyperlinks, cross-document links and bookmarks and will support accessibility. PDF documents produced from Microsoft Office Publisher “12” will also include additional support for pre-press specific functionality such as CMYK color models and printing page marks. The PDF format has been developed by Adobe and the specifications are available for developers like Microsoft to use."

I know that lots of customers and developers worldwide will be more than excited about this. Lots of Microsoft Consulting Services customers required to integrate "save as PDF" functionality to their solutions; I would love to be back with them and tell them: You can!

Today, a big set of managed applications generate Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets, and now, without using third-party PDF libraries, you will be able to change some lines of code to save the files using PDF format. Even outside managed applications, you can now save your legal contracts, requests for proposals, work orders, finance budgets and more!

The best part is that Office "12" still has more surprises to announce, so keep close to Office Developer Center and be the first to know the future of Microsoft Office.