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4 stars
Version: PrimoPDF 5.0.0.19
"Very easy, good result"
Pros: As simple as it gets; Free; Very good quality page output
Cons: Had some weird header and footer cutoff issue with certain Excel pages that pushed out onto the edges of the page, which didn't appear as such in preview and printed to paper from Excel properly
Summary: Installation was a breeze. The fake print driver is instantly usable. Printing to it brings up a simple window with option to select an output file. Not a great deal of choice on output options (essentially, two quality levels) but I'm not so sure there is much of a need for more options. If you do need more, you probably should be investing in a commercial product. It does a great job of figuring out how to rotate pages properly to fit the view. The only hitch came with a large Excel workbook that had two-line headers and a margin that pushes very near the edge of the page. Printing directly to paper worked fine. Previewing with the PDF driver looked fine. The output, however, was chopping off the top portion of the first line of the header, and the only solution was to spend time formatting the header font size and the margin to eliminate the truncation. Not a huge deal but a bit annoying that the preview didn't match the result. Most workbooks won't exhibit this problem because most don't push the margin so closely and/or don't contain a crazy two-line header. This so far is the only workbook that has produced a flawed output without some further tinkering. The workbooks that have some pages turned portrait and some turned landscape were appropriately rotated so that each page can be viewed without turning your head sideways. I've tried a few other free PDF creators, and this was the simplest one to consistently produce a good output. The others either had unacceptable limitations, were severely handicapped for the free product but had a buy-up available, required installation of more than one piece to get the same functionality, produced lower quality output, or were generally more difficult to use. This one is highly recommended.
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