I made an interesting discovery today when I was exporting some Word Documents to PDF. I had previously been using the PDF printer installed on my machine (CutePDF), but this time I used the Microsoft Save add-in to save the document as a PDF.

I found the Microsoft add-in worked much better. Not only was the file saved to PDF faster, but the file size was smaller and my links within the Word Document carried over to the PDF. By ‘links within’ I am referring not only to external URL links, but my table of contents. As you know, in Word when you generate a table of contents, you can click on the item and jump to the applicable section in the Word Document. By using the MS add-in, this exact functionality existed in the output PDF.

Unfortunately, the free Microsoft add-in is only available for Office 2007, but 2007 users should definitely take advantage.