This tip is for Microsoft Office 2007 owners out there who want a way to easily save their .docx documents as .pdf without having to pay for Adobe Acrobat. Truthfully, the reason most people want Adobe Acrobat is simply to be able to save files with a PDF extension. Unfortunately, this can be quite cost prohibitive to do.

There is a better way, in fact it is officially supported by Microsoft itself. They have a free extension for Office 2007 owners that allows any file to be saved as an XPS or, more importantly, as a PDF.

Simply download and install the add-in. I didn’t even need to restart my Word program, the new file save extension was immediately available. This has got to trump any PDF print tool out there which promises to “print” files to PDF at a cheaper price than buying Acrobat. Even CutePDF, which I used to use, cannot beat this as they require a PostScript extension like Ghostscript to be installed.

Give Microsoft credit for realizing how important the PDF format is these days and making it easy for users to utilize it freely.