Tame your computer - save your work as a PDF

In her regular series for Cambridge Network members, software training expert Karen Roem offers handy tips to help you 'Tame your computer'. This week she describes how to save your current document, presentation or worksheet as a PDF (Word, PowerPoint, Excel*)...

 

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format used to present documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. One of the purposes of saving your documents as a PDF is to keep the format and text of your files from being modified. It is very easy to save MS Office files as PDFs, without the need for any other software or add-ins.

Here's how:

  1. Click the File tab and select Save As. (Or press F12.)
  2. If necessary, type a File name.
  3. Press TAB and type P (or select PDF *.pdf from the drop-down list).
  4. Press ENTER or click Save.

(I’ll add F12, TAB, P, ENTER as the shortcut of the week on our home page and will update the shortcut archive accordingly.)

After you’ve saved a file as a PDF, you cannot convert it back to an MS Office file format without specialised software or a third-party add-in. (After all - and as mentioned before - one of the purposes of the PDF format is to keep the format and text of your files from being modified.) To change the PDF file, open the original file in your Office program, make your changes, and save the file in PDF format once more.

By the way, if you want to email your document, presentation or workbook as a PDF attachment, you can do that without first having to convert it to PDF and/or opening Outlook. See http://roem.co.uk/tip_347.php for details.

See Tip 232 and Tip 250 for additional information related to hiding and unhiding rows and columns.

* Unless stated otherwise, these tips were written for Microsoft Office 2010.

 

28 March 2016

Karen Roem offers software training and support through her company Roem Ltd.  Contact her by email   (Karen@roem.co.uk) or visit her website at www.roem.co.uk

Roem Ltd is a Learning Collaboration approved supplier, having come recommended by Cambridge Network member organisations. Network membership means you automatically have the right to book on to any LC course at any time, while some categories of membership actually include LC training units.



Looking for something specific?