If you have no access to Microsoft Word, and want to convert existing *.doc and *.docx documents to PDF, you can use the free LibreOffice 26.8 (Apple Silicon) on your Neo to open the Word document and then Export as PDF. Since LibreOffice is a deliberate clone of the MS Office suite, the resulting PDF should be quite accurate to the original Word document content.
LibreOffice also can be used from the command-line (e.g. Terminal) or in a script to batch convert Word documents to PDF. Only the extension is changed for the resulting PDFs. This is more involved, and likely more appealing to those that prefer the Terminal command-line.
Launch the Terminal application. It will default to your home directory (e.g. /Users/yourname). The path to directly access the LibreOffice command-line tool is onerous. I created a new directory (e.g. bin) in my home directory where I store scripts, and in this case, the soft-link to LibreOffice:
mkdir -p bin
ln -s /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice ~/bin/soffice
So that this new directory is seen by the Zsh shell, I alter my PATH statement in Zsh's ~/.zshrc to:
export PATH=".:$HOME/bin:$PATH"
If you are still using the Bash shell, then make that PATH change in ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_login, or ~/.bash_profile (just one of these). Then depending upon your shell:
source ~/.zshrc
source ~/.bashrc or source ~/.bash_login or source ~/.bash_profile
I suggest if you are batch processing many Word documents to PDF, that you also create a PDF output directory (for example):
mkdir -p ~/Desktop/PDF
Now, change directory to where your Word documents are stored and use LibreOffice to convert them to PDF, specifying the output directory for the PDF results:
soffice --headless --convert-to pdf --outdir ~/Desktop/PDF *.doc?
There will be no displayed output from the preceding command when sending to a --outdir destination. Otherwise, you will see confirming output in the Terminal for each conversion.
