How it works
Your PDF Document
Print, and Share
It Legally Binding
Why Did My Mac Osx Automator Workflow Convert Word Doc To PDF ?
For many other reasons I use Neo Office instead of Microsoft Office. It's a free open source suite of programs from Sun Microsystems that does everything Office can and more. It reads and writes all the office file formats including the older ones from a time when Mac PowerPoint files were not compatible with PC PowerPoint files.... You get the idea. But one feature I rarely see mentioned is the extremely robust PDF export. So you can open a native .doc file (maintaining all the Microsoft formatting) and then export as a PDF with complete security, font, compression, and versioning control, none of which the generic printer PDF export does. The latest port is always at neooffice.org
Convert Word to PDF: All You Need to Know
The full PDF file includes an explanation of what PDF is and how to use PDF. It's pretty straightforward, but still useful. There are several ways that you can use Office. The most useful is to open a .doc file and then export it as PDF (see the tutorial above on PDF export). Alternatively, you can open up a .xls file or a .ppt file and then export that to PDF. The second way is to use Neo Creator (the software that creates PDF), then export the resulting PDF file. That's not as good as the PDF export, but it can be useful if you're printing a bunch of stuff out at once, or you want to have access to a bunch of different PDFs. Note that you can always use a plain old .doc file, or a Word document, or a PowerPoint presentation, or whatever, as-is for importing.