I always assumed installing Adobe Acrobat was by far the best way to print a Word or Excel document to PDF.

While Acrobat has indeed its advantages, certainly over web-based services like Doc2PDF online, it does have a moderate price tag if you use it only for this purpose.

Because I recently experienced hyperlinks would not be converted properly when printing a Word document as PDF with Acrobat, I decided to look for a dedicated “print to PDF” Office plug-in.

I was surprised: apparently Microsoft initially intended to have a “save as PDF” feature available in Office 2007 by default (a big step for them!). Of course Adobe wasn’t happy with that and forced them to remove it immediately.

Luckily Microsoft has made it freely available as an Office 2007 add-on.

This made me happy as hyperlinks are now properly converted.

I develop on Windows. Whether that’s good or bad, I am happy with it. Until now I’ve been a subscriber of the Microsoft Action Pack which basically is yearly MSDN-like subscription service with the latest versions of all their popular software (from their OS’s to the complete Office suite). It has been created for Small IT Businesses and enables them to recommend Microsoft products to their customers.

But earlier this year Microsoft announced they would require subscribers to take an exam to prove their knowledge of the products. I must admit I can understand this policy change.

However, I am not interested in taking an exam with them and since I cannot renew my subscription, I am evaluating my options. And I have to do this quickly as my subscribtion expires on November 15th. Since I only really use Windows XP, Office and Visio I’ve summed it up like this:

• Windows XP: I have an OEM license that came with my PC’s, so basically that’s fine. No new versions, but I currently don’t feel a need to upgrade. I’m not (yet) ready to use Ubuntu to run everything so I’ll stick with XP for now.
• Office (Outlook, Word, Excel): I can narrow this down to Outlook (which I use heavily). Basically I have two options: use Gmail or buy Office. If I don’t buy Office, other applications can be replaced by open-source variants.
• Visio: I don’t use it that often so I’ll probably find a way around it.

So basically it’s Gmail or Outlook. The battle:

I already mentioned a complete move to Ubuntu. The biggest issue is: it will require several hours to get everything set up and be productive. Time I don’t have at the moment. Although I don’t want to exclude it completely as I’ve really started to enjoy Inkscape lately (and used GIMP in the past) which overcomes some barriers. I haven’t found a replacement for Adobe Fireworks though.

I’ll post an update after November 15th. Any suggestions are highly appreciated!

Edit: I almost forgot! Jeroen reminded my about the sync with my cellphone. After some panic, Lifehacker to the rescue.