Office 2007 PDF, XPS Plug-in Released

By Nate Mook | Published September 7, 2006, 12:35 PM

Microsoft on Thursday released a plug-in for Office 2007 that will allow users to save their documents in both PDF and XPS formats. The company previously planned to build in such capability, but bowed to pressure from Adobe, which developed PDF, to force customers to download it.

The add-on is compatible with 8 Office 2007 applications, including Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, InfoPath, OneNote, Publisher, and Visio. Customers can also use the plug-in to quickly send documents as e-mail attachments in both PDF and XPS. XPS is Microsoft's new fixed-layout document format that's based on XML.

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it doesnt matter as long as theres free saving to pdf, while there are free pdf programs out there, most people dont have the time or intelligence to go find it themselves, this way microsoft makes it easy. now the idea of xps thats just stupid

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Now what will Dell name it's high end desktops?

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I hear PDF will be available soon. ;)

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XPS is - as many other "revolutionary standards" from Microsoft - a useless format that will never become a standard. To become one, it has to be open source, or its license should be less restrictive.

Presented as a PDF killer, XPS will never replace PDF, who's truely available on all platforms, wide spread, well known and loved by all kind of users (from printers and DTP workers to businessmen and students.)

This add-in itself isn't very needed since there are several PDF generators that give the possibility to generate PDFs from almost any print capable application. Among these PDF generators is PDFCreator, an open source PDF printer of great quality.

Even MSOffice isn't a "must have" (for the common user) as there are several free replacements, from google's Writely to OpenOffice and Abiword.

The times when Microsoft was creating standards when it wanted and how it wanted are gone.
Doc format is dead (its death is called "OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument), an XML-based open standard that spreads fast among applications and platforms. ).

So will die XPS.

Amen... :)

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XPS??

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So what was the point? Now it's a plug-in, that's free? What did Adobe get out of this?

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the knowledge that no one will ever find the plugin.

hopefully they stick it in windows update and give adobe the finger.

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the same arguement that Real player use that people will never able to find real player when wmp is installed on the computer.

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