Export PDFs from Windows 10

- [Garrett] Hi, I'm Garrett Chow and welcome to Monday Productivity Pointers. Before the release of Windows 10, there was no native way to save documents as PDFs in Windows. If you wanted to share a file as a PDF, you had to rely on Adobe Acrobat or some other third-party application to generate it for you. Thankfully, Windows 10 has native PDF creation but it still seems like some people are not aware of it. So this week I thought I'd quickly walk through the process of how to save documents as PDFs in Windows. Start in any application that has a print option built in. I'm using Word Pad here but this will work in any program that can print.

When you're ready to save whatever file you are working on as a PDF, you can choose file, print or find the print command in the application you're using. Depending on the app, it may be located in the file menu or as a button in the toolbar or elsewhere. In this case, I'll go to file, and choose print. And here under the select printer area, I'm going to choose Microsoft print to PDF. Now you may see other PDF options here depending on what you have installed on your own computer. But if you're running Windows 10, you'll definitely see the Microsoft print to PDF option. With that selected, I'm going to choose print.

I'll give this file a name. And I'll just save this to my desktop. And that's it. The PDF is now sitting on my desktop, as you can see here. This is similar to the same functionality that Mac users have had for years in macOS. But unlike on the Mac side of things, you cannot include any additional data like metadata about the document's author, title, and so on, and you cannot password protect PDFs in this way in Windows either. If you want that kind of functionality, you'll still have to use Adobe Acrobat.

However, it's nice to be able to quickly generate a basic PDF of a document when you want to share a file and maintain it's look and feel without having to worry about also sharing the documents fonts and images as well. And because PDFs can be opened natively on Macs and Windows, you don't have to worry about your recipient not having the right software to view your file. Okay, and that does it for this week. I'm Garrett Chow and we'll see you next time for more Monday Productivity Pointers.