How to print to PDF on Windows for free

One of the nice things that Mac OS X has out of the box is support for PDF. You can easily print to PDF without any other software. Unfortunately, with Windows, that is not the case. There are commercial products available that allow you to print to PDF. But there is another way, a free way to do it. I set this up on my computer at work using the following tutorial: Creating a free PDFWriter using Ghostscript. The only thing that I did differently was to download and use HP's Universal Print Driver.

More about MS Office 2007 files

Just a while back, I blogged about how to open MS Office 2007 files on a Windows machine even if you don't have MS Office installed. I've just stumbled upon a website that will convert the files for you. I haven't tried it out, but it appears that Zamzar converts MS Office 2007 files as well as does many other types of conversions. This might be useful to keep in mind if you are on a different operating system, like Mac OS X.

How to open MS Office 2007 files on Windows without MS Office

I am currently using OpenOffice v. 2.4 at work, which doesn't support MS Office 2007 files. Sometimes I just need to read these files, and not really edit them. E.g., I will get a .docx or a .xlsx file from a colleague or vendor. Just yesterday I couldn't open a .docx file from our outsourced vendor. MS Office 2007 support won't arrive until OpenOffice.org 3.0 comes out (it's in beta testing right now). So my quick solution was to download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 file formats and the Word Viewer. Together those allowed me to open the vendor's .docx document. Note that the Word Viewer 2003 plus SP3 update seems to work well too.