convert msword to pdf

There are many free online utilities, for example: http://www.freepdfconvert.com/ which will send the PDF document to your email address. There are also add-ons for Word which allow you to convert Word .doc or .docx files to PDF format. Most of these are not free. Since a PDF is essentially a document which is ready formatted for printing in such a way that it will appear (almost) identical when printed on any printer, there are a number of applications which work as a 'virtual' printer on your system and produce a PDF from ANY document which you can print. Some, I find, are better than others. http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp is one of the better ones. If you install OpenOffice (a free and [fairly] compatible Office suite), you can open an MS Word document in that and save it as a PDF. It rather depends on the formatting of the Word document. OpenOffice will read most fairly simple formatting easily and correctly but cannot always reproduce some of the more advanced features of a Word format. Personally, if it's a one-off requirement, I would use one of the online facilities, if I might often require to create PDFs, I would install a 'virtual printer'.