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Amit from Labnol discusses some of the reasons why 3rd Party PDF writer applications may not be as good as the full Adobe Acrobat offering.

The marketplace is flooded with non-Adobe PDF writers that promise to convert practically every file format into PDF.

Like Acrobat, you can install these third-party PDF generators [1, 2, 3] as virtual printers and create PDF files from any application that has the Print button. Some services go a step further - you send them a file as an email attachment and they'll mail it back to you as a PDF.

That's not all. WordPerfect and OpenOffice have in-built PDF printers. Microsoft released a free PDF add-in for all popular Office 2007 programs except Outlook. Then there are online suites like Google Docs and Zoho Office that allow you to save documents as PDF inside the browser without requiring any add-in.

Navipane contacted me to review their addin for Excel on this site.
I went to the Navipane website, downloaded, installed and used the Navipane addin for Excel. I noticed there a bunch of similar addins for other Microsoft Products, notably PowerPoint, Word and Access.

I am using Excel 2007 so this review relates to how I interacted with Navipane in that environment.

When installing you are required to have Excel closed.
The first thing I noticed after opening Excel again was that there was an addin menu called Navipane in the ribbon, and a resize able tabbed window had opened up on the right hand side of the Excel pane titled Navipane System.
The tabs listed are Home, Sheets, Favorites and History.

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