Microsoft adds PDF support to Office 12

Follows Sun, pips Novell

Microsoft has revealed that the next version of Office will enable users to export documents in Acrobat PDF format, providing organisations with more options for archiving and distributing documents.

The next version of Microsoft's productivity suite, codenamed Office 12, is due to ship at the end of 2006. Its default file formats will be Microsoft's Open XML, but users will be able to convert these to PDF from any application that creates a document or outputs a report.

Darren Strange, Microsoft's UK product manager for Office 12, said that the move is a response to customers' demands. "We get about 120,000 requests a month for this feature, so we took the opportunity to add it into Office 12," he said. The process will be one-way: users can save a PDF version of a document from Office, but will still need Adobe Reader to open the PDF files. "The default is to save to Open XML, but you can output to PDF," Strange said. "A lot of companies see [PDF] as a way to reduce information risk, so it has become very popular in the enterprise."

There has been renewed interest in document file formats recently; Sun released its StarOffice 8 with support for the vendor-independent OpenDocument formats, and Novell said that it will add OpenDocument support to its WordPerfect Office. With Open XML, Microsoft's document formats will be equally open, according to Strange. "You cannot get locked in, because it's defined in XML," he said. Office 12 applications will also maintain compatibility with current Office file formats, said Microsoft.