There are few methods to generate document in pdf format. I notice a few friends bought Adobe PDF editor to produce ebooks, manuals and general documents. However, there are few other options which is free. You might want to consider the alternatives if you are on budget and would like to save cost for your business.
If you are Microsoft Office 2007 user, there is a free add-in. The Microsoft Office ‘Save As PDF’ plugin enables you to convert ms office documents such is words (doc, docx), excel (xls, xlsx) and so on, to PDF or XPS format. After installed the addin, you can save the document as pdf format as shown in the Figure1 below:
Figure 1: Office 2007 save as PDF
The disadvantage of this method is you are not able to create PDF file in any software other than Office 2007.
Another free solution to create pdf file is using a free virtual PDF printer. With this method, you can print your documents into PDF format in any software as long as print is supported. One of a good and FOC pdf printers is PrimoPDF.
Hope you can save money with the suggestions.