Apart from being a free-version replacement for MS Office Suite, another remarkable feature of OpenOffice is the ability to convert documents to PDF format easily and elegantly.

While some people resort to virtual PDF printers route, OpenOffice offers a more straight-forward approach to having PDF formatted documents. Some people are rather confused having asked to “print” a PDF while all they wanted was to “convert” a document to PDF, not print. So using OpenOffice makes more sense in this regard.

Those working with MS Office documents will find it very easy as OpenOffice reads all those documents very accurately.

To download Open Office Suite, follow this link.

Here, I am showing an example from OpenOffice Writer (similar to MS Office Word). To convert a document to .pdf is simply do “Export as PDF…”.

Some features that I find useful in OpenOffice:

• Hyperlinks are properly converted and work as expected in OpenOffice. In contrast, some Virtual PDF Printers do not handle hyperlinks correctly while some remove them altogether. This is very important if you want to keep all hyperlinks intact.
• You may choose to password-protect your PDF files if necessary.
• Easy to use. If you're familiar with MS Office, you can start using OpenOffice with little to no learning curve.
• While it is free yet it is very fast and powerful.

If this looks interesting, go download your copy here.