Not to get all weepy, or anything… But I thought Dwight might want to hear this from the normally ultra-cynical John Walkenbach:
Thinking back on four years of MVP Summits, this has been the best day of all in terms of interesting information. It was Office 12 all day. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it yet. But I can say that Excel 12 is awesome. It does stuff that I didn’t even think was possible. I never thought I’d be saying that about Excel, but it’s true.
Just curious: When was the last time anyone said that about Quattro Pro?
Ed Bott 
Ed:
Probably, it gets said everytime someone exports a Quattro spreadsheet to a PDF! Which you won’t be able to do in Office 12 til late next year . . .
Heh.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to testing Office 12. My “eh” was reserved strictly for the “startling” PDF news from the other day.
By the way, in my comments, several folks recommended Pdf995, a free PDF generator. I’ve not tried it, and it looks like it’s adware, but the recommendations it got are respectable. Might check it out at http://www.pdf995.com.
I’ve been using PDF995 for years and I’ve installed it for several clients, at least one of whom has used it for the past four years to export Excel worksheets to PDF format. It’s not adware, at least not in the sense you normally associate it with that word; it’s very inexpensive shareware.
And please don’t put words in my mouth. I never said or implied anything about the PDF news being “startling.” It’s another in a long list of welcome features being added to Office 12.
Ed: No, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. “Startling” was surrounded by quotes merely for emphasis & ‘tude. Did not mean to imply you said that. Probably should have used itals instead. Sorry.
I have not tried Pdf995 but the web site refers to a “sponsored” page that appears on startup if you don’t register it. But I definitely will give it a try if you like it.
When I hear the word “adware,” I think of a product that generates pop-up ads, in a browser or in its own windows. I think that’s a pretty common definition, and it’s a very loaded term for most people. PDF995 used to be nagware, IIRC. It displayed a banner in the program window (and maybe even on the printed page?) when you used the trial version of the software. Looks like now it’s ad-supported. As long as it only diusplays a Web page when you use the program and doesn’t install any other software, I would hesitate to call it adware. I’ll have to try the latest release to see how it behaves.
Ed,
I haven’t heard of PDF995. When I needed a “free” PDF creator for work and home, I stumbled upon the open source application PDFCreator.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
I’ve been using it ever since on both my XP and 2000Pro systems. Never a problem. Works fast and great. Since it is opensource–100% free. No banners/nagware/etc. Just installs kind of like a printer driver, then print your output to that “PDF printer” and follow the prompts.
Finally got a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro for work, but I still use PDFCreator at home.
–Claus
And another free PDF printer that I’ve been using for awhile: http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp
John
And exactly how many spreadsheets get printed to PDF? Very, very few. In most all businesses, when a spreadsheet gets passed around, it is intended to be used or to input data, not merely read. Moving on to PDF recommendations, PDF995 is quite accurate, but I strongly recommend pdfFactory Pro, which is easy, fast, and when combined with FinePrint, a must-have app.