News

Microsoft: Office 12 Will Handle PDF

October 3, 2005

Microsoft will build a "Save As" function in Office 12 for publishing Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and other applications' documents in the popular PDF format, a company executive said over the weekend.

Users will be able to save documents in PDF form by using the "Save As" command from within Office applications. Instead of printing the document and faxing it, or overnight-mailing it, customers can save a PDF and electronically distribute a read-only, 'as-printed' representation of the document. Most of the applications that will be included in Office 12, as well as stand-alone programs which are part of will have the new capability, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, InfoPath, Visio, Publisher, and OneNote.

Microsoft's addition of PDF to the file format list of Office could also be seen as a way to smooth relations with governments and businesses demanding open-source file formats for saving documents. Massachusetts , for example, has banned the purchase of software which doesn't save in "open" document formats; by Massachusetts ' definition, PDF is such a format.

Microsoft, however, denied that the PDF add to Office 12 was a response to Massachusetts . "First and foremost this was an answer to our customers," said Microsoft's Frost.

Yet if the fallout was better relations with government agencies and private enterprises after open-standard file formats, all the better. "One of the key trends that businesses and government have is the sharing of information across organizational boundaries. With PDF, businesses or even government can take advantage of that capability [to share documents," Frost added.

Microsoft has said it hopes to ship Office 12 in late 2006.