I don't know, this may be common knowledge, but the latest version of Foxit (a very good, free, low-resources pdf reader) includes an add-in for Word. Install it and Word will have a toolbar that enables conversion of your Word doc to a pdf.

I might have misunderstood (happens all too frequently) but you can save a Word doc as a pdf in Word by going to File>Save as and then scrolling down the menu on the bar that says 'File as type' and selecting pdf.

Not, as far as I can see, in Word 2002. That's why the foxit add-in is so useful.

And I prefer the 2002 version.

There's a "save as pdf" option on my print menu. Is that just a Mac thing or do PC users have it too?

http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/word-help/save-as-pdf-HA010064992.aspx

Save as PDF option may depend on having Acrobat installed. However, loads and loads of free alternatives, as per Alan.

One of the most common ways is to install a PDF converter registered as a printer. That way, you can simply "Print" selecting whatever it is you've installed as a printer and it will convert whatever you print into a PDF - not limited to Word, but to anything you can print.

Personally, though, having purchased and installed Adobe Acrobat, I'm not going to go back... It was worth the few quid to get some software that does so much extra.

G

I think any recentish Word version will let you save to pdf.

BUT, my e-reader officially reads pdfs, so I did that to a manuscript of mine so as to read it, and... it wouldn't. I had to download Calibre, to get it to convert properly.

I think doing it the other way round can be much more tricky? Have had problems with that (when sending documents to my Kindle) until a genius person told me to put 'convert' in the subject line and then the PDF will work on the Kindle.

Emma I've just got calibre for reading on my nook - I love it!! It's so clever.

Nooks are pretty good on PDFs (much better than kindle, I've found) but I can't find a way of getting round that annoying hard page divide issue so I tend to convert to epub where possible.

I use LibreOffice which lets you save as anything you like - pdf, rtf, odt, doc, docx, you name it. The one thing it doesn't do is epub (though you can get an add-on to save as epub, but I like all the clever extras in calibre so I'm sticking with that).