ZDNet has a story on Microsoft’s Office 12, and new functionality that will enable people to publish documents in the Adobe PDF format.

Office 12, which is expected to be completed by the second half of 2006, will let end users take an Office document and convert it to PDF format, Brian Jones, a program manager for Microsoft Office, said in a blog posting. People will not be able to actually read PDF files from within Office applications; a PDF viewer will still be required, he noted.

The PDF support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio and InfoPath, Jones said.

“We’ve really heard the feedback that sharing documents across multiple platforms and long-term archiving are really important,” Jones said in his blog. “People now have a couple options here, with the existing support for HTML and RTF, and now the new support for open XML formats and PDF.”

It is interesting to see more and more integration between the various document formats and technology. This should be good for consumers, who won’t be “forced” to buy one product over another, as a result of incompatibility issues.