Microsoft PDF and XPS Add-ins and the 2007 Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh

It has been great to see the web buzz over the past few days over the availability on the Microsoft Download Center of the Microsoft Add-ins for Office 2007 for Save as PDF and Save as XPS. The better news comes today that you can now actually use these with the public release of the 2007 Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh. (The add-ins are specifically for Office 2007, and if you had Beta 2, then you already had the Beta 2 versions of these.)

While the PDF and XPS export add-ins are still at a beta stage, we have made a number of improvements since beta 2, so I encourage you to send your most complex documents through. If you use screen readers or other accessibility tools, let us know about our document structure tagging. If you submit documents to governments or archiving systems that require ISO-standard PDF, try out the ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A) support. If you have a PDF print workflow, send add-in generated documents through it. If you are already providing us with Office beta feedback (thank you), you can keep using the channels that work for you. If you are looking for a new way to provide feedback, you can use the Publisher 2007 Connect site for all PDF and XPS add-in feedback. (PDF and XPS bugs are most useful to us when you include the original Office document as well as the PDF or XPS.)

To view PDF files, you need a PDF reader. (Adobe Reader is a popular one.)

To view XPS files, you need an XPS reader. If you have Windows Vista RC1, then you should be set already. If you are running Windows XP (or 2000 or 2003), you can download the XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack to view XPS documents. Beta 2 of this pack was recently released.