Coming in SP2: Save as PDF or XPS

In this week’s blog post, we’d like to talk about a cool feature that’s coming in Office 2007 Service Pack 2: the ability to save a document as a PDF or XPS file right from your favorite Office applications.

First, a little background. Saving as PDF is one of the most common feature requests we hear from our customers. What many people don’t realize is that we actually created a PDF/XPS download for Office 2007 that anyone can download for free! So, in order to make this handy feature accessible to more of our customers, we’ve decided to include the download with Service Pack 2 (SP2) once it is released.

What does this mean for me?

What this means for you depends on which of the following four categories you fall into:

· You didn’t have our free PDF/XPS download installed before you installed SP2. After installing SP2, you’ll be able to save documents as PDF and XPS files natively in most Office apps. To learn how to use this feature, see the section below.

· You already had our free PDF/XPS download installed before you installed SP2. In this case, installing Service Pack 2 will simply upgrade you to the latest version of our PDF/XPS download, which includes some bug fixes but otherwise works exactly the same as the previous version.

· You or your company have taken explicit steps to block the PDF/XPS feature from being used (for instance, via Group Policy settings). Don’t worry! Your settings will still be honored after upgrading to SP2—the ability to save as PDF or XPS from Microsoft Office apps will continue to be blocked.

· You are a system administrator who hasn’t blocked the PDF/XPS feature from being used yet, but you would like to do so before deploying SP2 at your company. You can use Group Policy to block the ability to save as PDF or XPS on the computers at your company, so don’t hold off on installing SP2 just because it includes this feature. Follow the instructions at this link to download and install Group Policy administrative templates. To block the PDF/XPS export capabilities in Office 2007, you’ll want to install the office12.adm template. Then, in the Group Policy Editor, look for “Microsoft Save As PDF and XPS add-ins” and enable the “Disable Microsoft Save As PDF and XPS add-ins” policy. If you have installed PDF or XPS add-ins made by companies other than Microsoft, these will continue to work.

How do I save my documents as a PDF or XPS file?

Some of you may be wondering how to save a document as a PDF or XPS file once you’ve installed either the download or Service Pack 2. Well, it’s quite simple, but it depends on which Office application you’re using. In Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access—which use what we here at Microsoft call the “Ribbon”—you can save as PDF or XPS by opening the Office Menu, clicking on Save As, and selecting PDF or XPS as shown in the screenshot below.

Save as PDF/XPS in ribbon apps

Meanwhile, in other Office applications, such as Publisher and OneNote, you can save as PDF or XPS by clicking the File menu and choosing Publish as PDF or XPS, as illustrated in the screenshot below.

Save as PDF/XPS in non-ribbon apps

It’s as easy as that! So, now that you know how to use this nifty feature, enjoy the ability to save your documents as PDF or XPS files in Office 2007.

Omeed Chandra
Software Engineer in Test

 

About the contributor: Omeed Chandra is a Software Development Engineer in Test on the Microsoft Publisher team. He has been working at Microsoft for a year and a half, and is convinced that the music scene has been all downhill ever since The Beatles broke up.