If you are using 4.0 you are in luck. With acrobat 4.0 adobe gave the user the ability to simply drop a word doc file into the window and it would convert it. In 5.0 they have removed this function for Microsoft Office. If you want to code something to automate this you can modify the following tif2dpf code (which will work with tiff, xls, doc, ppt):
Private Sub Tif2PDF(filename As String)
'pass the full path of the .tif file to this function
Dim AcroApp As CAcroApp
Dim AVDoc As CAcroAVDoc
Dim PDDoc As CAcroPDDoc
Dim IsSuccess As Boolean
Set AcroApp = CreateObject("AcroExch.App"

Set AVDoc = CreateObject("AcroExch.AVDoc"
Call AVDoc.Open(filename, ""
Set AVDoc = AcroApp.GetActiveDoc
If AVDoc.IsValid Then
Set PDDoc = AVDoc.GetPDDoc
' Fill in pdf properties.
PDDoc.SetInfo "Title", "My Title"
PDDoc.SetInfo "Author", "The Author"
PDDoc.SetInfo "Subject", "The Subject"
PDDoc.SetInfo "Keywords", "Keywords"
If PDDoc.Save(1 Or 4 Or 32, _
App.Path & "\pdf\convertedfile.pdf"

<> True Then
MsgBox "Failed to save " & filename
End If
PDDoc.Close
End If
'Close the PDF
AVDoc.Close True
AcroApp.Exit
'Cleanup
Set PDDoc = Nothing
Set AVDoc = Nothing
Set AcroApp = Nothing
End Sub