For many users, Microsoft’s PDF and XPS Converter for Office 2007 simply doesn’t work. It’s not that I have anything against it per se, but it seems to be plagued by a bug: some users can use it without any issues; other users always get this error message:
Office 2007 PDF Error
“The file is in use by another application or user.” I’ve done all kinds of Googling (Binging?) about this, to no specific avail. The error message is a general Windows error, legitimately displayed if someone else (or a hung application) has grabbed and edited a file that you currently have open and that you’re trying to save. There’s enough information about this to make me think this is a ‘known issue’ but not enough to actually help me resolve it. I’ve reinstalled it twice already. I’ve tried changing the PDF output location to another folder – and that works in about 20% of occurrences. Nothing conclusive then, but it’s just too irritating for those situations where you need to – quickly! – make a PDF. (Personally, what I love the most about this error message is the link at the bottom: “Was this information helpful?” – “Hm, no, not really.”)
Back to the old school way of making PDFs: by using one of the myriad free Windows printer drivers that save as PDF. Since I’m using 64-bit Vista, I’m recommending “doPDF” which advertises itself to work on both 32 and 64-bit Vista. And it works great: it’s fast, consistent and its output is actually more reliable than the Office PDF converter’s (compared to PDFs generated on another machine with Microsoft’s utility, images PDFed with doPDF are more ‘readable,’ particularly those that were once vector/Office SmartArt/Visio diagrams and were pasted/inserted into Word).
Configuration and use of doPDF couldn’t be simpler. After installing it, simply select it as your printer and print the document you’re working on. It works for any Windows application that can print. In the free version, the options are limited – but then again: how many options do you need when creating a PDF?
doPDF Printer Properties
You can set the resolution, page orientation, and that’s about it. Once you start printing, you can also select where to save the resulting PDF and whether or not you want to embed fonts. While embedding fonts results in a much larger file, I learned the hard way that in most cases, it’s the right thing to do (for example, one of the local print shops I use didn’t have ‘Calibri’ installed – they were using an earlier version of Office – and a recent document didn’t print out very well…).
doPDF Save As Dialogue
Like anything that’s free, doPDF is the little brother of a more configurable payware PDF printer driver called novaPDF. I can’t say anything about novaPDF because I haven’t tried it specifically. But if I ever find myself in need of greater configuration options during PDF creation, doPDF has established the company’s ability to write good software, and I would spend the money. (I suppose I should really consider getting Adobe Acrobat, but it seems very expensive for what it does. Adobe have become the victims of their PDF format’s success.)
It seems it was Kaspersky Internet Security that was preventing me from saving as PDFs. See this Kaspersky technical page from their knowledge base: http://support.kaspersky.com/faq/?qid=208280046
Wow, what a great find, Steve. This is the second time Kasperky got me with something like this – and it seems to stay silent when it does it, so you can’t even guess what’s going on :)
I’ve now selectively disabled Word from being proactively monitored by Kaspersky. I’m sure that’s not a great idea from a security perspective, but we’ll see…