Using Muhimbi’s PDF Converter with Office 2010

Earlier today we released a new version of our popular PDF Converter for SharePoint. One of the key changes in this version is that it fully supports Office 2010 file formats, including all new formatting features such as Excel 2010 Sparklines.

Full installation details are provided in Appendix – Office 2010 Installation of the Administration Guide, however one detail is so essential that we feel we have to repeat it in this blog post. After all, who reads boring documentation anyway?

Update: As of version 5.2 64 bit versions of Office are supported as well. The following is for those customers who run older versions of the software.

The single most important thing to take away from this post is that no matter what CPU architecture you deploy the PDF Converter on, if you plan to use Office 2010 to carry out the conversions then you should always install the 32 bit version of Office 2010.

Even though the Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint is a hybrid 32 / 64 bit application, the 64 bit version of Office will not work in combination with our software. Even if it did, it would provide little to no benefit.

For more details about the differences between the 32 and 64 bit versions of Office, including Microsoft’s recommendation to run the 32-bit version of Office 2010 on 64 bit hardware, read this article on Microsoft’s Office 2010 blog.