Let’s say you work on a document in Microsoft Word 2007 (with the docx format) and would like to share it with someone who has Windows 2003 operating system on their PC or laptop. Do you think they will be able to see it?

As much as you’d like for them to be able to see it, the answer to that question is no.

What you will have to do is create another document that can be viewed by MS Office 2003, and send it across to the user.
Now wouldn’t this problem be solved if we converted that MS Word 2007 document into the PDF format, and then sent it across?
Since it works seamlessly between several (often competitive!) software programs such as spreadsheet, photo-editing and organizer programs, this is one reason why PDF has become so successful since Adobe Systems introduced it in 1993. All your user will have to do is to download and install a PDF Reader from the internet. In short, PDF helps creators across the globe share their work over the internet twice as securely as any other file format available in almost no time at all.

Now, in order to change the file format to PDF from other formats that you are most comfortable working with, you will need a PDF converter. And there are several of them that are available for free over the internet (just google the keyword ‘free pdf converter’) that will convert MS Office, Lotus, Open Office documents, images and even web pages, apart from the expensive Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro software which will help you create PDF documents from a scratch.