When you need to convert multiple documents to PDF for distribution (or from one Office format to another) there are a few utilities around. The most workable I found is the UNOCONV utility which is build on top of LibreOffice / OpenOffice. This uses the OpenOffice conversion facilities rather than a simple PDF print driver.

On Ubuntu it can be installed via Software Center or via apt-get from the core repositories.
sudo apt-get install unoconv
Combined with the -exec option of the Unix find command this makes conversion of whole directory structures a breeze.
#find all Word Documents and convert to PDF<br></br>find . -name "*.doc*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \;<br></br>#find all Powerpoint Documents and convert to PDF<br></br>find . -name "*.ppt*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \;
To show all the possible conversion formats you can use:
unoconv --show
The following list of document formats are currently available: