Creating a PDF from Word

Creating PDFs is a big part of Acrobat. We are going to look at creating a PDF file from Microsoft Office, particularly Word. After this video, you should feel comfortable creating a PDF, no matter what the circumstances in Word. In Word, there are two ways to make a PDF. On the PC platform, we have the ability to File Print and print to a print driver as well as the ability to use a macro that's built in and hidden on here under Acrobat, called Create PDF. On Mac, we have got one way, which is File, Print. I'm going to show you both ways to be able to generate a PDF in Word.

When you make a PDF out of these programs, there is a couple of things you've got to think about here on the Windows platform. As we go through and we go to create a PDF file from File Print, it's a straight PDF, which basically means there is no extra settings we can set. On the Windows platform, if you choose Create PDF, we do have some extra things we can do, which is setting our Preferences right here. So what I'm going to do is we are going to go through and print to a PDF show you that method and then we will go through the second method here which is using a macro to create. Come up to File or up to the Office button up top, you will see it says Print.

I'm going to print to that. Typically, you choose the Adobe PDF print driver, which comes with Acrobat when you install it. You simply choose it like a regular printer and if you really want it to, you could just click OK right now, but there are few Properties you want to set before you print it to a PDF. Clicking Properties in the right-hand side or you should be able to find in the dialog somewhere, brings up the Adobe PDF Document Properties dialog box. These are the settings on how the PDF is made. Now, a PDF can be generated a lot of different ways and there is a good reason for that. Simply because if you take this Word document, you want to send it to somebody else to print, you can save the quality to be higher.

If you want to send it to somebody to go to a website, you can save the quality to be lower. Looking at Default Settings, we have a lot of different settings in here that are pre-built or pre-setup for us to be able to use. We have High Quality Print, Press Quality and Smallest File Size, also this Standard one that you will get used to using. The differences between these High Quality Print is if you want to make a PDF just to sent to your Desktop printer for reviewing let's say, you're going to choose High Quality Print. Press Quality, if you want to send this PDF files so that you can get it actually printed at somewhere may be bound, send it out for presentation quality, you're going to choose Press Quality.

Smallest File Size, is if you're in trying to take this PDF and email to somebody or post it on a website, that's Smallest File Size. There are other settings in here that we can go through. These are just subsets of PDF, but we don't need to focus on those right now. Those are for printing mostly. So what I would like to do is I'm going to choose Press Quality so you get the highest quality we can get. If you look below that you will see PDF Security. PDF Security allows us to secure the file so that other people can't copy information from a document. You can also setup other things like they can't even print it. So there are things you can do to lock down the PDF file.

When you setup Security in here, you can actually have it so it reconfirms every time you do this or you can set up Security with a password. So it just does it every single time without asking you. That's the Use the last known security settings. You typically, don't do it here simply because you make the PDF and then you can not open it up or you can't edit in the Acrobat, so I put the security on an Acrobat typically. The Output Folder, it's going to ask you what to do when it makes it. It might put in your Documents folder or your hard drive or Prompt for Filename it typically prompt. Adobe PDF Page Size that is determined on the flies, meaning based on your document.

Typically don't change this unless you wanted to go bigger or smaller. Looking below, you can see it says View PDF results that makes the PDF opens in Acrobat so you can see it directly after creation. Add document information, and I love this. If you hover over this, it shows below in here, it takes any Word document information and converts it to PDF document information, which is searchable. It's only going to use the system fonts not the ones embedded in document or working with the document, which is a good thing. Any log files, you don't have to worry about this. It just deletes the ones. It says, "Hey! Look what I did." You can delete them and if you ever have a filename, the same thing you want to tell to replace the existing file.

Ask you if you want to replace it. So typically, when I make a PDF, Mac or Windows platform, go to Print. You are going to choose your setting here and choose which one you want to use. I guess I typically want a High Quality Print, Press Quality or Smallest. Now that I have got Press Quality chosen, click OK. It sets up your settings here and simply click OK. By clicking OK it's going to print. It's going to setup the document. What it should do is as it saves it out here. It's going to ask me where to put it. I'm going to put this out on my Desktop. I will just save it. You can save it anywhere you want to.

It runs through and saves the file. Once it saves the document, it's going to open it up within Acrobat, because we have that check box selected which says, show me after it's created and it should launch Acrobat for you. There you go. There is the final version. Now, this is the PDF file. That's using the print method to generate a PDF file. Go back to Word. I want to show you the macro way now to create a PDF file. Once again, this is available on in a Windows platform. Now if you choose to use this method. This little macro here called Create PDF, it's going to generate a PDF just like it did through File Print but you get some extra settings here.

Get some extra things you can see. There are a lot of other options in here, which we are not going to cover, but a lot of things you can do here and some later titles we are going to get to those. But when you go to create a PDF using this macro, you need to set your Preferences first. This is the step I think a lot of people mess. Click Preferences, it's going to open up the Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box and what we get here host of settings that some of them were similar to the Print dialog box. A lot of them are quite different though, because you get more features. Look under Settings tab here. You can see Conversion Settings. Clicking Standard once again, you can see the same settings, High Quality Print, Press Quality, Smallest File Size.

Those are ones we are going for. This time we are going to one that is emailable and still printable. So choosing Smallest File Size, you're going to be able to see the PDF directly after you have created just like we saw, it's going to ask you for a filename. You can turn these things on or off depending on what's you want to do. Typically, if I want a make a bunch of PDFs what I'm looking at them, I will turn off Adobe PDF results. Convert the document information in Acrobat information, so that it can be searched. You can also create a PDF/A compliant file. This is in archival format, which means later on down the road somebody could open this PDF file.

Typically based on xml. There is a button on the right called Advanced Settings. Most of the time, I'm just going to tell you don't have to get in here, but if you want to you click Advanced Settings, you will see that this is what we used to have to do when we made a PDF. A PDF is created and it does things like embeds your fonts. It takes your images and compresses then. It works with the color. Those settings that we set initially, take care of all this. If you really want to get in here, you can start kind of get your hands dirty but we don't need to. So click Cancel. Now, if you look down here at the Application Settings, as you make a PDF from Word these are the extra options you get above and beyond printing to a PDF.

So we have the ability to attach the Word document to the original PDF that it generates, which is great for certain workflows that need to edit the file. You can create Bookmarks. Bookmarks are like an interactive table of contents and it does it based on settings we will see in a minute. Add Links. If you had hypertext links within the Word document- even if you didn't have them made, if they were just a website address just typed in- it will add those and they will become Acrobat links which are fully functional in the PDF. And Enable Accessibility and Reflow with tagged Adobe PDF. Now, this little gem here allows you to make it so that users that need to read this aloud, that need a screen assistive device to read this, it makes it easier for them to read.

It doesn't really alt tag the document. So this is what's you get when you create with the macro. You get this ability to turn this on. Now, we are going to talk about that in a later video. For right now we will just leave it set. So those are the typical settings. We also have some extra features, which make the Acrobat PDFMaker worth it sometimes. You can see Security. We can either require a password to open this. Every time I send stuff to my lawyer I do this. So it's like CIA, he has got to enter some information. Just to open a file they can put a password in. We have Permissions. Permissions allow you to restrict what somebody can do.

So if you don't want them to print it- here's the lynch pin- you don't want them to copy it, etcetera, you can assign a Permissions password and they have to give this password just to take the settings off so they can do those things. This is the Security. We are not going to do that here. Again, the Word tab at the top, we have some extra Word features here. Some of these can be very important for certain workflows. Things like taking Word comments and converting them to PDF comments. If you're within a cycle, you're trying to send this off to a client or somebody who has already made comments and you want them to be able to see them in the PDF. You are going to tell it to display the comments as notes.

They will look similar to Word. If there any footnote and endnote links those will be converted as well. If you use those you understand what that means otherwise you don't need to worry about that and there is advanced tagging, which we would not going into. Clicking the Bookmarks tab is a great feature. Bookmarks are an interactive table of contents. It's just like a table of contents you build in Word, where you can click a Subject Header or a Subject on the left side of your screen and it takes you to that page. Now, bookmarks are automatically generated. So if you use certain Word styles, seeing things like Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2 and you will see a big list down here, you can tell it to find where those are being used and convert them automatically to this interactive table of contents called Bookmarks.

If you turn on Convert Word Styles to Bookmarks, you got to watch out. It's going to take every single style in Word and make it fair game to create a Table of Contents out of. Sometimes that gets pretty crazy. So I tend not to do that. Convert Word Bookmarks. If Word had Bookmarks, you can turn those into the table of contents within PDF. So that's a bookmark in Acrobat. On the far right here, we have a Video section. We are not going to go to that. That's a little bit of an advanced feature but the basic features we are covering here are all along these four tabs. Settings, Security, Word and Bookmarks and once you get these set, you're ready to go.

By clicking OK, all you have done is set the Preferences. Now, your job is to create the PDF. By clicking the button up here Create PDF, it will take into account the preferences you have set and allow you to save this where you want. I'm going to put this on the Desktop, save it out here. You can name it whatever you like. I typically name with the same thing as the Word document. It's going to save it as a PDF file and as an added little bonus here, if you didn't check your Preferences before you did this, there is an Options button here. Clicking Options, allows you to see a summary of the preferences you have already set.

So if you miss something, forgot to look at them, you could go in here and turn them on or off depending on what you want the document to do. You can also tell a Page Range. Now, something new in Acrobat now which is really exciting and we are going to look at this in a later video is the ability to convert a selection within the Word document. So if you have let's say a table out here or a chart or something that you have inserted into a Word document, you want to turn that in your PDF. We could have selected it first, created a PDF and told it just to use the selection. It's already set, so I click Cancel and I will save the file.

Once it saved, it should run through. It's going to say I have already got one out there. I just made one. It's going to run through and allow me to create the PDF. Since we told it to show us the file once it's done, it will take that over to Acrobat and show you the file itself. So there is our self-generated PDF. Now, learning to create PDFs, I believe is a pretty essential part of using Acrobat, by understanding not only different ways to create PDFs in Word but understanding the settings involved. You will be able to generate PDFs no matter what the setting in Word.