Microsoft Office comes with in-built PDF support. You can save any Microsoft Office document into a PDF file from the menubar, ribbonbar or the toolbar. You can also export any Office document into PDF format with password protection.
These features for saving Office documents into PDF format work great when you have to save one or two files. But if you have to convert a large number of Office documents into PDF files then you cannot use these features from inside the Microsoft Office interface as it becomes very tedious and tiring.
If you want to batch convert Office documents into PDF then you can use an open-source tool called OfficeToPDF. It is a command line tool that can be used to instantly convert any Office document created by Office versions from Office 2003 to Office 2016. However it is not a fully standalone application as it requires you to have Microsoft .NET Framework 4.x installed as well as any one of the Microsoft Office 2016, 2013, 2010 or 2007 installed on your PC. If you are using Office 2007 then you need two extra things – Office PDF plugin and Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime.
Without these installed, OfficeToPDF will give an error and will fail to convert your documents into PDF files. This is because it uses a component from Office to perform the file conversions. A very easy way to find if you have all the requirements installed is by running OfficeToPDF tool. If it shows any error then you will know what is missing.
In order to use OfficeToPDF tool for converting documents to PDF, we can simply open a command prompt window and give the command OfficeToPDF.exe sample.docx sample.pdf. This is a very easy to use command, the first parameter is the Office Document and the second command is the PDF filename to be produced.
We can use this command in batch scripts and other applications to produce PDF files in large numbers. It can save our time and help us make things more organized.
You can download OfficeToPDF from https://github.com/cognidox/OfficeToPDF.