Posts Tagged ‘Word’

One of the easiest ways to transfer documents from person to person or from your desktop to a printer is through the use of PDF files. From Adobe, the creator of the PDF format:

“Invented by Adobe Systems and perfected over 15 years, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) lets you capture and view robust information—from any application, on any computer system—and share it with anyone around the world. Individuals, businesses, and government agencies everywhere trust and rely on Adobe® PDF to communicate their ideas and vision.”

There are many benefits to using this type of file. PDFs are multi-platform which means that they’re viewable on Mac, PC, UNIX, mobile and many other formats. This is really handy if you use a Mac and need to send a file to a PC user! Another key benefit is that they maintain the document’s integrity. All of the fonts, images, and graphics will remain exactly how you created them, regardless of what application you used to make the file. This has been a huge benefit to the printing community because you can submit a file without worrying about font problems or embedded images. PDF files are also searchable and can even be made secure, requiring a password to view them. One thing to be aware of is that the contents (text, etc.) of a PDF cannot be edited once it is made, so you cannot send a rough draft as a PDF file and have others edit it and send it back.

Another great benefit of PDF files is that they can be compressed easily to make a large file more manageable. For example, say that you have a Powerpoint presentation that has a number of photos that you’ve taken. Files like this can often be 10+MB large and this is often large enough to shut down some email boxes! By saving to a PDF file, you can shrink the file down to 1-2MB which is a much more reasonable size.

How to make a PDF file:

This process is slightly different between Mac and PC computers. I am definitely more familiar with the Mac platform, so I encourage the PC users out there to post suggestions in the comments below!

On a Mac, PDF creation is built into the operating system. If you are in Microsoft Word or Powerpoint, go to the File menu and select “print”. In the print dialogue box, there is a button that says PDF. Click on it, select “save to PDF” and you’ll be asked to give the file a name. Type in whatever you want to call it and press “save” and you’re all done! Apple has also included a great PDF application call Preview in with the operating system that allows you to read these files.

On a PC, there isn’t a native way to create a PDF file straight out of Word or Powerpoint. The best way to allow easy PDF creation on a PC is to purchase Adobe Acrobat Professional. It can be a bit pricey, but it will give you all of the features that you could ever want.

There is also a program that has come highly recommended to me called CutePDF Writer. This will allow you to set up a PDF printer on your machine and print PDF files out of most print applications. If you have any experience with this, be sure and share your thoughts in the comments below!

So, that’s a brief overview of PDF files. Here at the Center for Research on Learning, we post almost all of our document online as PDF files to make them available for people to download. Even if you’re not planning on ever creating a PDF file, it is easy to read them from any machine. Adobe has provided a FREE PDF reader called Adobe Acrobat Reader and it is available for download at their website www.adobe.com.