Increase Efficiency: Convert Office Files to PDF with OfficeToPDF

We’ve made a new release (1.5) of our OfficeToPDF open source project and pushed the code to its usual home on CodePlex.

It comes fairly soon after the release of 1.4 in August 2014 but the timing was right for two reasons:

• There was a flurry of issues raised and requests from users
• We needed a stable build ourselves for inclusion in the forthcoming CogniDox 8.9.0 release

As a reminder, our house rule is to scrutinise all of our software to see if any can stand alone and serve a purpose independent of the CogniDox application. It isn't always possible - internal software dependencies or too difficult to isolate as a standalone tool. But, when we can, we do. This particular project is distributed under a permissive Apache 2.0 open source license so that it can be integrated into a batch conversion process or other applications.

The updates in release 1.5 include:

Detect password protected files

Microsoft Office documents that are password protected are now not submitted to the PDF conversion server. This will prevent the conversion server from repeatedly failing to convert files that cannot be opened. However, we also added new switch commands to the command line to provide a read password or a read/write password to open the file for conversion.

Extra PowerPoint file types

We now handle finalised PowerPoint presentations and have added pps, ppsx and ppsm support for PowerPoint presentations.

More Excel options

You can now add new switch commands to show formulas, show column and row headings. and set a limit on the number of rows to convert into Excel files.

More PDF options

New switch commands are provided to exclude properties and/or tags in the generated PDF file.

Take a look at the project page to see what else is new.