Microsoft has announced that Office 2007 will not have the ‘Save as
PDF’ feature ‘out of the box’ as previously promised for the next
release of the Office Suite.
OFFICE 2007 VS ADOBE
Microsoft has announced that Office 2007 will not have the ‘Save as PDF’ feature ‘out of the box’ as previously promised for the next release of the Office Suite.
In addition the ‘XPS’ document format will not be directly supported in Windows Vista.
Both features will be available as separate downloads from Microsoft – so despite what some headlines suggest, you will be able to create PDF’s (at least straight-forward ones) from Office 2007.
In many ways that’s no different to the situation right now. There are several products that will let you create PDF’s from Office (or many other programs). One such is PrimoPDF among many PDF creation products out there.
Aside from Microsoft’s announcement there has been silence from Adobe (makers of PDF) which has let Microsoft gain the upper hand in PR terms with only conjecture as to Adobe reasons for the breakdown in negotiations between the two.
It’s been interesting to see the ‘unofficial’ suggestions that Adobe is unreasonable to want payment for use of PDF in Microsoft Office. While it’s true that other programs have ‘Save as PDF’ feature available under, apparently, free licence from Adobe, most of those products are offered free to the public. For example OpenOffice.org has PDF creation and pays nothing to Adobe. Adobe is entitled to make their format available under the terms they wish and it’s reasonable to expect Microsoft to pay for use of PDF in a product that is a major source of income and profit.
Historically Microsoft has been very unwilling to pay for technologies to use in Microsoft Office. Office Watch readers may recall unhappily the removal of a feature in Office after Microsoft lost a patent case and apparently chose to inconvenience their millions of customers instead of settle with the patent holder. Click here for our article on the subject.
On the other hand, Adobe might be worried about the development of the XPS format by Microsoft. XPS is described ‘as a paginated representation of electronic paper’ which sounds a lot like PDF to most people. Microsoft officially says XPS isn’t a rival to PDF but few people believe that. Adobe doesn’t believe it and, frankly, most Microsoft staff don’t believe it, even when saying otherwise with a straight face.
More about XPS can be found here and we’ll be looking at it in detail for a future issue of Office Watch – close to when it will be deployed in Office and Windows.
Meantime the two companies and their herds of lawyers can have it out in the Court of Infinite Litigation. One way or another you’ll be able to create PDF files from Microsoft Office, both now and in the future – we’ll keep you informed about how to do that here in Office Watch.
