In an interview with PDFzone, Microsoft says Office's PDF support was a long time in the making, a response to customer demand.Why did Microsoft decide to support native PDF output in Office applications in its next version, code-named "12" and due out next year? Some analysts claim it's a capitulation to Adobe's domination of the electronic document space, while others guess it's some kind of referendum on Microsoft's own Metro or InfoPath technologies.
Turns out the answer is neither of those. Instead, says Microsoft general manager of information worker business strategy Alan Yates, end users drove the initiative.
The feature development process for Office, Yates says, works like this: Microsoft puts some features into Office that no one's yet asking for, but that the company thinks end users will find useful. Others, he says, get written in because customers demand them. PDF support falls into the latter category, to the tune of 120,000 tech support queries per month.
Many users already can make PDFs in Office, using sophisticated plug-ins from third parties such as ScanSoft. Adobe itself offers probably the most feature-rich plug-in suite right in the Acrobat box. Macintosh users get the functionality built into the operating system if they're using OS X or later. Windows Office users can choose from many free PDF-creation options, too, most of them simple print drivers downloadable from Web sites.
Click here to read Don Fluckinger's commentary on Microsoft's decision to add PDF out to Windows.
This ecosystem of PDF support for Office has been around for years. It's "101" stuff for many users. Yet the amount of feedback Microsoft gets about PDF, Yates says, shows that the process of using third-party software to export Word files to PDF still confounds a significant number of Office users.
This group would be better served with Office-native support out of the box, the company decided. Feature development started more than a year ago with the Microsoft Publisher team, which began work on supporting PDF 1.4—whose files are well understood by the printing industry—for its next rev. From those efforts grew support for PDF across Office.
Just as it does for a lot of new features for Office, Microsoft took many months to debate how much PDF support it would put into the application suite, before it wrote the first line of code. Then the company decided to write its own code, as opposed to licensing it from a third party such as ScanSoft or Adobe. Yates says that Microsoft engineers worked from the PDF specs that Adobe has made publicly available.
As with all software in development, features come and go in different revs, but Yates says a beta version due next month will reveal more about the PDF settings that users will get to play with inside Office.
Office will support several common output formats, such as PDFs tuned for print or web publishing. Users will get a PDF creation wizard to help guide them through determining appropriate settings for their document—a process many Acrobat users will attest can be confusing without a little guidance.
Updating previous reports from Microsoft, Yates says that Office will support the PDF 1.5 spec, the update that came out with Acrobat 6. He added that users will be able to search PDFs from within Office, too. Office 12 will not be able to translate Word forms to PDF forms, a feature some users might find worth the price of the application suite alone.
He believes that PDF support in Office will increase the use of PDF as a file format in workplaces that use the apps. At first blush, it might seem that the move would hurt third-party developers who have written their own third-party PDF support for apps like Word and PowerPoint, but Yates thinks it will present more opportunities for them: The more people use PDF, the more of this robust document format's features they'll need—and the more they'll need developers to create software to meet those needs.
But what about the timing of the announcement? Rumblings in the tech press suggest it's not coincidental that, soon after the state of Massachusetts announced it will no longer use Office formats for state documents last month, Microsoft announces PDF support in Office 12; coincidentally, PDF is one of the formats Massachusetts will use, along with OpenDoc.
"They can announce things whenever they want," Yates says, but points out that PDF support's been in the works since long before Massachusetts made its decision.
