PDFs from Microsoft Word (PC)

- When you install Acrobat Pro DC, the PDF Maker addin is installed in Microsoft Office applications and that adds an Acrobat menu item at the top of your interface. Now I can't see that option now, because this document opened in Read mode so I'm going to change that by going up to View, and then switching to Edit Document. And there are all my controls including the Acrobat menu item. When you click on Acrobat, then you'll see the PDF maker ribbon toolbar. But, before you run all the way over to the left and click Create PDF, you really should explore the options and settings, so let's take a look.

I'll start on the right with Embed Flash. If you have multimedia that you wish to embed in the PDF, you just navigate to the file, and choose it, and at the bottom you can select a skin. And that adds a little frame and a controller. Now that phrase that you see there may seem kind of odd, SkinOverallNoFullNoCaption, what does that mean? Well, for example, SkinOverPlayStopSeekMuteVol, means that it's going to have a play button, a stop button, seek, the ability to traverse the movie by clicking edit, some part of this little bar at the bottom, or hit the mute button, or control the volume.

See, now that starts to make sense. Especially if I choose a really simple skin, SkinOverPlay. All you get's a play button. So I'm not going to add any multimedia but you have an idea about the possibilities. Create PDF and Run Action creates the PDF and then hands it off to Acrobat and triggers an action to be performed, such as setting the initial view, which controls the way the documents going to look once somebody else opens it up. Redacting Sensitive Information, and so forth. And as you hover over an item, it gives you a little bit of additional information about what kind of action you'll be triggering.

Acrobat Comments, this is kind of an interesting feature. You can send out a PDF, invite reviewers to add their comments to the PDF and then import those comments back into the originating Word file. It's kind of like Track Changes, except you have options to import, accept, and delete comments. And I think this is kind of nice, if you choose Show Instructions, it actually walks you through how this works. Which essentially is forging a relationship between this parent Word document and the PDF created from it. This can be really great in a collaborative environment.

Create and Send for Shared Commenting, it's really just a time saver, creates the PDF, hands it off to Acrobat, and then sets the Send for Shared Commenting process in motion in Acrobat. It just saves you having to perform those steps manually. Mail Merge, now here's a little tip, if you are creating a mail merge, don't go all the way through with the merge process. Instead, just get it all set up and then this feature is going to create a separate PDF for each record. Create and Attach to Email, well, the name's pretty self-explanatory, it creates a PDF, launches your default Email application, and then attaches the PDF to the message.

It's nothing fancy, it's really just a little time saver. But here's the most important part. Preferences. You have four tabs across the top of your preferences for PDF maker, Settings, Security, Word, and Bookmarks. So we'll cover Settings first. The Conversion Settings, that just governs how the content in the Word file gets converted to a PDF. The option for Standard is your default, and I think you're going to find that almost all of the time that's going to work just fine for you. But you do have other options.

Press Quality, High Quality Print, and the PDF X options, are really intended for commercial or digital printing. The A stands for archive, so the PDF A options are for archiving documents for long-term viewing. And then Smallest File Size, if you have a lot of really large photographs and you found that Standard didn't create a small enough PDF for your needs, you might explore the Smallest File Size option. You also have the ability to create your own conversion options by clicking Advanced Settings, and then controlling the options.

But I'm going to tell you that for the most part you can just stick with Standard and things are going to be fine. View Adobe PDF result just means it's going to launch Acrobat and show you the PDF. Prompt for Adobe PDF file name, well, obviously it lets you name the PDF. It's based, by default, on the name of the Word file, but you can change that of course. But this does something else useful, it forces you to pay attention to the directory you're saving the PDF in, which could save you hunting for it later on. Convert Document Information, such as author name and so forth, that becomes information in the PDF file.

And back again to PDF A, if you're in an environment where you're asked to adhere to a PDF A standard, here are all your options. And so if you are, chances are somebody's going to tell you which one of these you need to choose. Attach Source File, which isn't chosen by default, actually lets you attach the Word file as an embedded bit in the PDF that's going out the door. That can be handy in a collaboration environment, where the person that's receiving the PDF would be responsible for performing any edits to the Word file, instead of you having to send it separately it sort of hitchhikes on the PDF.

Create Bookmarks. Bookmarks are little navigational controls that are good for jumping from page to page in a document or from chapter to chapter. If you have hyperlinks, this options ensures that those are live, clickable links in the PDF. Enable Accessibility and Reflow, accessibility is an umbrella term for Acrobat creating a document that can be read, or have it read to someone who is visually impaired, or perhaps physically impaired so that they can't use a keyboard. You want to make things as simple for them as possible and what this does is creates some underlying structure in a PDF, it's not something we see, but enables that PDF to be read by a screen reader or reflowed on screen without losing content.

Under Security, you can assign two passwords to a PDF. One that the user has to know in order to even open the document, and one that you might use to protect any restrictions you've put on the document. You can restrict a document so that they can't do anything with it except view it. You can keep them from printing it. Now you can't keep them from making a screenshot, but this is still pretty good protection. Under the Word options, if I had any comments that I wanted converted to notes in the PDF, I would check this. And in this document, I actually do have a couple of comments, and I want them to become comments in the PDF.

When I choose that, you notice that this little area sort of wakes up down here. And this is sort of redundant, Include, yes, I do want to include my comments. But this is nice, I think it's good to spring those notes open so they sort of have a larger footprint and they're more obvious instead of just their little icons, so I'm going to click that. And then Color, I can choose the color of the little icon that represents the note. So it's not really obvious how you change this, but you just click on it repeatedly and it cycles through the available colors, there's a light blue, there's a green, there's a purple, red, yellow, white, which I think would not really be very visible unless it were a dark background of the document.

And I'm just going to go, I think, for the purple, there we go. And then Convert signature fields specified by pdfmarks, that's a very foreign sounding option and the chances are, as you might expect, you're probably never going to encounter that. So let's switch to Bookmarks. Now bookmarls, I want you to think of headings and styles in Word as sort of a tagging mechanism, and that's the way Word converts that content into bookmarks. So here, it by default, checks your headings, now to me, headings and other styles are still all paragraph styles, but Word considers headings to be sort of special and it sort of assumes, that well, if you are using styles at all, chances are you're at least using the heading styles and you may never go farther than that.

But I'm just going to use the heading styles, I think that's really all I need to become bookmarks. So I think I'll just leave it at the default. And then I don't have any Word bookmarks and I haven't used any additional styles, so I think I have everything ready to go. All I've really done is say, "Hey, I want to carry my comments through to the PDF." So I'll click okay. After all that I still haven't made a PDF, but now it's time. So I'll click on Create PDF, and here's the moment I said you should pay attention to where you're saving it, so that you can find it later.

And you can change the name, it's going to pick the name of the Word file, and build on that, but you can change it, if you want. And when I click Save, now the conversion process takes place. Depending on how long and how complex the document is, this might, of course, take longer. That was pretty small so it didn't take long. And here I am in Acrobat. And see, there are my comments, with my festive purple highlighting, and they're sprung open. Now lets take a look at the bookmarks. So on the left I'll click on the little bar that opens up my navigation pane, click on the bookmarks icon, and again, this is not a very long document, but this does at least show you what the mechanism is.

So as I choose a bookmark, it's going to highlight that part of the document, take me right to it, and there we go. So, as you can see, the PDF Maker addin gives you extensive capabilities for creating PDFs and then controlling their subsequent handling. And that's why it's a really good idea to explore the options and the settings before you click Create PDF, because you want to make sure you're taking advantage of all the available possibilities.