Well there goes one part of my 2007 Office demo! Acrobat is booted out of Office. I used to get cheers when I first started to show the ‘Save as PDF or XPS’. This is really a shame that we have had to cut this capability from Office as I believe that this was quite high up on the customer’s request list for the new release. I find it quite ironic that one of the driving factors for the cut was that Adobe wanted us to charge for this feature but we, yes Microsoft, wanted to include it for free. It looks as though there will still be a separate free download available as long as no legal action ensues.

What this does mean is that our own XPS (XML Paper Specification) format will be more prominent. My understanding of one of the reasons behind people liking the PDF format is that the documents become effectively ‘read-only’ when they are shared. This can of course be achieved using Information Rights Management but being able to do this with a little built-in feature is very cool.