We've all heard of printing but you may not be so familiar with virtual printing. A virtual printer is a program whose user interface resembles that of a printer driver but is not actually connected with a physical computer printer. What use is that you might ask? Well, it's often use as an alternative way of converting documents to another, more easy to share format. For example, you've got a word document which you want to send to a friend but they haven't got MS Word. Simply make a virtual printout to a PDF file and send that instead. It's also useful when you want to send documents to a fax server or perform printing tasks not possible on an external printer. Here are my top 5 apps for virtual printing:

• doPDF - Virtual print PDF documents from any application

• PrimoPDF - Designed for virtual printing from Word, Excel and Powerpoint

• novaPDF - Lightweight virtual printer and very low on CPU usage

• Universal Document Converter - Enables you to virtually print just about anything

• Zan Image Printer - Virtual printer driver and document converter