In my earlier post, “How to Use Microsoft Office as PDF Creator and Converter?“, I had mentioned how Microsoft Office files can be saved in PDF format. However this add-in can be used only by Office 2007 and you can also convert Office 2003 file formats to PDF using office 2007. Few were asking if there is any add-in for Office 2003 as well. Sadly there is no add-in provided by Microsoft, though there are some by third party which comes with a price.
So here is a free alternative way to convert Office docs such as Word and Excel to PDF format.Google docs provide free service to convert Office files to PDF format. All that you have to do is upload the file you want to convert, select that file and then save the uploaded file as PDF format which will be downloaded to your system.
These are the file formats which can be uploaded as Google Docs:
Documents
HTML files and plain text (.txt)
Microsoft Word (.doc), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw)
Spreadsheets
Comma Separated Value (.csv)
Microsoft Excel (.xls) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods)
File Upload to Google Docs in Batch Mode
If you have large number of files which you need to convert as PDF, you can try uploading to Google Docs in batch mode. But you need to have installed Google toolbar and all that you have to do is just drag and drop the files that you want to upload inside the browser.
I have given a tutorial on this at “How to upload Google Docs in Batch Mode?“
Wow that’s a great tip. Haven’t noticed this on Google Docs.
gr8 post, i was in need to convert of word docs into pdf, thnx !
nice tip, i didn’t notice this
Nice tip buddy. I’m going to be using this.
Stumbled.
Google Docs is limited to 500K import from Word (and everything else it imports). Not very useful for substantial Word documents.