Adobe Acrobat 5.0 [OLD VERSION]

Acrobat's portable data file ('PDF') output is as close to a lingua franca as you're going to get in computerdom. Pretty much the entire population has the Acrobat Reader. For those that don't, you can easily direct them to a download.

Although the software has many different options, the standard settings work straight out of the box. It integrates directly into your Office XP software via embedded macros. To create a PDF document out of, say, a Word ".doc" file, you just click on the little 'Convert to Adobe PDF' icon that will now appear on a new toolbar at the top of your Office applications. From there, it's a snap.

All software should be this easy. Another value-added advantage - the resulting PDF will almost always be smaller than your original Office-based document, making distribution less of a burden on your bandwidth-challenged friends and co-workers. For example, this morning I took a graphics-intensive 1.9 Mb Word file through the conversion process and ended up with a PDF of 700 Kb. Your mileage may vary, of course, and the biggest factor will be the nature of your content. Still though, I've never seen Acrobat become part of the problem by increasing the size of an already too-big document.

This software will pay for itself almost immediately.