Office 12 To Speak PDF

Office 12 PDF format.

Office program manager Brian Jones dropped that bombshell in his web log, after Office top dog Steven Sinofsky shared the info with Microsoft VIPs last week. Jones is no stranger to formats other than Microsoft's own. He's done a lot of work on Microsoft Office's XML formats.

What the news means is if you upgrade to the Office 12 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, and InfoPath, you can save your masterpieces to Adobe's popular Portable Document Format. From there, it can be read by zillions of people with the freebie Acrobat reader. Older versions of Office require the use of a third-party product, like the full Adobe Acrobat, to convert Office documents to PDF.

This is certainly good news to many who view PDF as the lingua franca of documents. But let it also be known that Corel WordPerfect Office has been able to do this natively for quite some time. That talent alone has kept WordPerfect up and running in federal/state government agencies and legal firms even as Microsoft Office has taken over the rest of the known universe. Let it also be known that the new StarOffice 8 also offers this capability. As in now.

Office 12 apps are due in the second half of next year.

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Will Microsoft's move placate folks (that's YOU Commonwealth of Massachusetts!) who want Microsoft to support an open document format? Whoops, maybe not, because PDF does not equal THE OpenDocument Format blessed by the state.'

On second thought, Massachusetts HAS endorsed PDF as an accepted format, so this may get Microsoft off the hook at The State House.