Office 12 - Word to PDF File Translation

Posted By: Charles | Jan 30th, 2006 @ 11:01 AM | 111,902 Views | 24 Comments

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Scoble recently caught up with Luke Williams, a software developer on the Office team, who helped create a nifty new feature in Office 12: Word to PDF file translation (you can save a Word document as a PDF file by simply choosing Save As...PDF, etc).

Tag: MS Office

Rating:

Shark_M

Very Cool. I cant wait to get my hands on this. I wanted this feature ever since office 2003, so its cool to hear that this will be in office 12.

One question. Will you be able to create PDF FIles that end users can fill stuff in? like a special form, where the users fill in the blank spaces or even select things, as in the PDF tool from Adope , or this is just for text and pictures and links?

another thing, is there a way to print a PowerPoint presentation into a PDF file with 6 slides / page using the new feature in Office 12? or is this just for word?

very cool stuff

Zeo
Channel 9 :)

Besides the new UI....I believe this to be the KILLER feature of O12.
Smiley

And this is the first time we've heard scoble use a really interesting technical term...[6]

izzy

Wow, all versions of Word are made in pure C? No (I need to watch my language), go figure. That explains why the app is so fast ! Tongue Out

winston

Just curious - what's the scoop on all the red cups ??

dmarsh
Knee draggin'

I guess my only question is, why isn't print to PDF just a feature of Windows Printing and not specific to Office? If it's just a print driver, it should work with every application that prints... why limit the technology to Office 12?

AndyC

Printing to PDF is easy (there are already free solutions), the problem is that you lose a lot of information that way (hyperlinks, document flow etc) - this is something that can only really be added by native PDF support at the application level.

PDF support in Vista would be great, not sure we'll see it though (sadly)

dmarsh
Knee draggin'

Andy,

Thanks for the reply. I was actually trying to bait the MS folks into responding because I realize the fancy linking and bookmarking certainly only comes at the application level and therefore clearly it isn't simply a print driver solution. Wink

If they do however have some kind of driver solution which they then do some kind of post processing on, it would be really silly if they didn't offer this as part of the Vista platform. So I guess I'd just like to hear all the geek details on how they decided to implement it.

Cheers,
Drew

PetKnep
IE7 RTM'd yay!

Good work Luke! Nice to see some Wolverines up on Channel 9.

LukeWill

Shark: For this version there's no interactive forms support planned (although they'll show up statically in the PDF). Ppt can do multi slides per page, there's a "handout" print option on their dialog.

izzy: There are actually a few rare spots in assembly, but otherwise yeah, it's always been C. We've had a decent amount of debate over how to best leverage the benefits of C++ in the product with the recent decision to switch over.

winston: My office mate and I stay well-hydrated... that's several months' worth of cups in one Yoda-capped monolithic sculpture.

PetKnep: go Blue!

Glad people are looking forward to this, I think we're going to be able to deliver something good. As an added note, we're souping up the accessibility capabilities - we can do significantly more now with structure tagging than in November, when this video was taken.