Microsoft denies PDF support is a reaction to Massachusetts decision

Microsoft has denied that it has added support for the Portable Document Format (PDF) to the forthcoming Office 12 as a reaction to the State of Massachusetts' adoption of open document formats, maintaining that it has been working on the development for some time.

The ability to save documents as PDFs using the Office 12 versions of Word, PowerPoint, or Excel was announced at Microsoft's MVP (Most Valuable Professionals) Global Summit, some two and a half weeks after the company showcased new Office 12 features at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC).

In between those two events the State of Massachusetts finalized its plans to adopt OpenDocument 1.0 as its standard for all office documents by January 2007, with PDF also to be used for fixed content documents, leaving Microsoft's Office out of the running for the State's 50,000 or so desktops.

Microsoft's program manager for Office has moved quickly to stamp on any suggestions that Microsoft has rushed to add PDF support to Office 12 to get around that decision, however. We could not build in this kind support overnight, he wrote in his blog. I wish we could turn out features like this that quickly. The timing of the announcement itself may seem a bit coincidental, but the actual work to support the format definitely isn't.

He maintained that Microsoft had been working on adding support for PDF to Office 12 for some time in response to customer demand, and that the company had simply focused on other features - such as Office 12's new user interface - at the PDC.

Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of the Microsoft Office product development group, had earlier stated that the company received 120,000 requests a month for the ability to produce PDFs from within Office.

In any case it seems unlikely that the ability to save Word or Excel documents as PDFs will sway the Massachusetts Information Technology Division, especially since Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and the open source OpenOffice.org project have supported the creation of PDFs since 2003, and also support OpenDocument.

Microsoft is well behind much of the rest of the industry in supporting PDF. Adobe Systems created the format in the early 1990s although its PDF/A and PDF/X subsets have been adopted as standards by the International Organization for Standardization.

Support for creating PDFs was also introduced into Apple Computer's Mac OS X with its release in 2001, enabling PDFs to be created from any Mac OS X application.

It does not appear that PDF will be supported natively by the forthcoming Vista version of Windows, for which Microsoft is developing its own Microsoft XPS Document Format for fixed format documents, however.

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