Microsoft: Office 12 Will Include PDF Support

Without issuing any official press statement, Microsoft has announced its intention to introduce .PDF support in the next version of Office, scheduled to appear under the name of Office 12.

The .PDF (Portable Document Format), which has been promoted by Adobe Acrobat, has several advantages, one of the most important being that it allows the opening of documents on several platforms and systems.

Microsoft has justified its decision by saying that the possibility to save MS Office documents in .PDF format comes only to meet the customers' demands.

"Each month, the company receives 120,000 demands from users who request the implementing of the .PDF format", said Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President la Office Product Development. Commenting on this decision for Reuters, Sinofsky didn't specify whether the feature will be free or will require a certain fee to be paid, but most likely, users won't be charged any money in order to save in .PDF format.

As Brian Jones says in his blog, the .PDF format will not only be integrated in MS Word, but also in other applications of the suite, from Powerpoint to InfoPath. The MS Office 2004 edition for Mac already had this feature included.

The .PDF format, in which users will be able to save their Office documents, won't include the advanced features offered by Adobe Acrobat.

The announcement made by Microsoft is regarded by analysts as a consequence of the decision taken by the Massachusetts officials to make the Open Document format a standard.