The next version of Microsoft Office, v12 which is due out at the end of 2006, will support creation of PDF files from various Office tools like Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc., reports Yahoo!
Up until now, people have to rely on third party tools to create PDFs from their Word documents or Excel sheets, many of which are commercial ranging from $20 to $450, the most popular(& most expensive) being Adobe Acrobat. A few of them are also free, like pdf995, PrimoPDF, CutePDF Writer.
So Microsoft has also used one of the free tools to put in PDF support into Office 12. Looks like Microsoft is trying hard to make Office attractive enough for users to shell out $$$ to upgrade!! 😉