How-To: Acrobat installs one-click buttons for creating PDFs in Microsoft's Office applications, but sometimes the buttons go missing. Here's how to restore them.Q. I thought I could create PDF files from within Word and other Office applications with the click of a button. Where's the button?
A. PDFMaker is a macro that installs with Adobe Acrobat Standard and Professional and lets you create PDF documents from Microsoft Office applications with the click of a button.
On Windows, however, the PDFMaker buttons and the Acrobat menu may be missing from Microsoft Office 2003, XP, or 2000 applications such as Excel or Word if a crash occurs, or if there's a conflict with other macros or add-in files. The source of the conflict can be difficult to locate, so here are a few possible solutions to the problem.
To restore the PDFMaker buttons in your Office application, first try the following: In the Office application, choose Help > About application name. Click Disabled Items and then check to see if PDFMakerOfficeAddin is listed. If so, select it and click Enable. Then close all dialog boxes and restart the Office application. If the PDFMakerOfficeAddin isn't listed, go to your desktop and navigate to the Acrobat 7.0/PDFMaker/Office folder. Look for the file PDFMOfficeAddin.dll. If the file is missing, try reinstalling Acrobat.
If the problem is in Word, specifically, try removing other potentially conflicting macros files. To remove macros from Word for Windows, choose Tools > Templates and Add-Ins. Then select each item in turn and click Remove. Then quit and restart Word. If the PDFMaker icon is still missing, choose Tools > Templates and Add-Ins again, and make sure the removed items aren't there. If they are, you will have to uninstall the macros from Word or uninstall the application that installed the macros into Word.
If the problem is in Word 2004 for the Mac, choose Tools > Templates and Add-Ins. If PDFMaker.dot is listed under Global Templates and Add-Ins, check it, and then click OK. If not, click Add, and then navigate to the folder Applications/MS Office 2004/Office/Startup/Word. Select the PDFMaker.dot file, click Open, and then click OK in the Templates and Add-ins dialog box.
If these solutions don't work, you can try running Acrobat's Detect and Repair feature, which allows you choose optional components, such as PDFMaker, and run a repair routine. To run Detect and Repair, make sure all other applications are closed and then in Acrobat choose Help > Detect and Repair. Make sure PDFMaker is selected and then click Continue. You may need to restart your computer afterward.
