Are you too cheap to buy MS Office? Well, this may be the solution to your document-sharing woes. The following script will convert .doc files to .pdf files. You need to have antiword and ghostscript installed -- both are available via fink.
#!/bin/bash
INPUT_FILE=$*
OUTPUT_FILE=${INPUT_FILE%.doc}.pdf
echo "INPUT_FILE=${INPUT_FILE} OUTPUT_FILE=${OUTPUT_FILE}"
antiword -p letter "$INPUT_FILE" | ps2pdf - "$OUTPUT_FILE"
Just paste this into a file named doc2pdf, make sure it is in your path, then type chmod +x doc2pdf to make it executable, and fire away.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2003100909553346