For many other reasons I use Neo Office instead of Microsoft Office. It's a free open source suite of programs from Sun Microsystems that does everything Office can and more. It reads and writes all the office file formats including the older ones from a time when Mac PowerPoint files were not compatible with PC PowerPoint files.... You get the idea. But one feature I rarely see mentioned is the extremely robust PDF export. So you can open a native .doc file (maintaining all the Microsoft formatting) and then export as a PDF with complete security, font, compression, and versioning control, none of which the generic printer PDF export does. The latest port is always at neooffice.org
I've written a few programs for it. See below for links. But I thought it was worth mentioning. Also, there is a free version on the web.