I have Adobe Acrobat PDFwriter available as a printer on the PC at my
office, but not on my PC at home.

I do not have Adobe Acrobat, so I'm guessing PDFwriter must have been
installed when I set up Adobe PageMaker 7, as that program comes with
the ability to export to PDF.  I have PageMaker 7 installations on
both PCs with similar setups.  (I may have upgraded existing
installations of PageMaker 6.5 to 7 on one or both PCs, but it was so
long ago that I don't remember.)

I'd like to install PDFwriter at home so that I can create PDFs from
other programs, including Excel '97.  How do I do it?

Thanks for letting me submit my comment as your answer, I wanted to
make sure it worked for you first. If you ever have problems with PDF
writing, I would suggest the full version of Acrobat (which is very
powerful), or if you just need to write them as another means of
output, some of the free writers mentioned below. Thanks again for
your question.

skermit-ga

I don't know how you're even using PDFWriter from your office computer
as it shouldn't be available. Adobe Pagemaker 7 is listed as shipping
with Distiller which from a review:

"
PageMaker 7 also features enhanced PDF creation from PageMaker
documents. This is accomplished through Acrobat Distiller 5, roughly
1/3 or 1/2 the full-blown Acrobat application. With these updated
capabilities, PageMaker now creates modern PDFs and eBooks (an eBook
is a PDF with special tags that allow text in the PDF document to
reflow to better fit the screens of PDAs and similar handheld
devices). To create a PDF directly from PageMaker 7, the user simply
chooses File>Export>Acrobat PDF and, after a short time, is presented
with the menus to specify their PDF output features, all of the
features available to Acrobat Distiller, including document security.
"

From my understanding, you shouldn't have the ability to export PDF
from any other application other than Pagemaker 7. I have both
Pagemaker 7 and Acrobat installed, so I can't verify whether or not my
full functionality is from just Acrobat, or from Pagemaker as well. I
would try to reinstall Pagemaker 7 on your home computer and make sure
that Distiller is reinstalled correctly, if you say it works with your
office computer and you have never installed Acrobat on it, you may
well get it to work on your home computer, but I can't test that
without uninstalling both programs of mine and then reinstalling just
Pagemaker to test. So I'm putting this all as a comment so that
another researcher can give you a more definitive answer.

http://www.macreviewzone.com/html/reviews/house/software/02/pagemaker_7.html

skermit-ga

Thanks for your comment skermit.

Now that I take a closer look, I see that PageMaker 6.5 is actually
still installed on the office PC in addition to PM 7.  Acrobat
Distiller 3 and 5 are both present, too.

Also, I have Adobe Photoshop 7 installed, and previously had Photoshop
5 installed on the office PC.

Did PDFwriter ship with PageMaker 6.5 or Photoshop 5?  If so, can
PDFwriter be installed by itself?

I do remember an option in one of the installs (including Photoshop)
to separately install something Acrobat related, while it may have
been distiller again, it may actually be an old version of Acrobat
full, I don't know. I have come up with another solution though, I
found a link to a page with MANY alternative PDF writers, some of
which are free, but none of which I have experience installing or
running. If you're of the brave of heart, I suggest you give it a try.

Search for "free" on this page and try one out:
http://www.pdfzone.com/bguide/product/SearchResults.asp

Also, if it works out for you, would you mind me posting this as an answer?

skermit-ga

kaan:

As my colleague skermit-ga has suggested, there are many free options
available to you.

I use CutePDF Writer as my PDF printer on my home PCs, works like a
charm. If you want to be able to generate PDF files at home, but do
not wish to go to the expense of buying Acrobat, then consider using
CutePDF Writer:

http://www.acrosoftware.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp

Regards,

aht-ga
Google Answers Researcher

I think you can download something which can make PDF files.It is no
need to use Adobe Acobat if you only want to create PDF files from
other files like Word,Excel and so on.A lot of programs can do.You can
search.Good luck!

I've taken another look at the install for Adobe PageMaker 7, and
tried the optional install for Acrobat Distiller.  This version of
Distiller behaves in almost the same way as PDFWriter did.  It doesn't
modify Excel's menus to add an "export to PDF" option, but it installs
itself as a printer, which is meets my needs nicely.

skermit, your original comment pointed me in the right direction, so
feel free to take credit for answering my question.

Kent