There are almost 260 million Microsoft Office 365 users. Word is a component of Microsoft Office 365 as well as several other licensing options. That’s a huge number of MS Word users who might benefit from an understanding of the benefits of PDF.
Converting Word documents to PDF is a great tool for users who want to preserve format and more. Read on to learn more about the important benefits of converting Word to PDF.
What Is Word to PDF Conversion?
A document created in Microsoft Word can be converted into a “portable document format” or PDF. Microsoft Word has an option to save a document in the PDF format by selecting the “Save” option from the “File” menu and selecting the PDF file format.
You can read PDF files using Adobe Acrobat Reader but that’s not the only way to open a PDF file. Many applications have the capability to open PDF documents. Also, web browsers have PDF handling capability.
You can’t edit a PDF document. You can print it and share it with other people. These features make it a powerful tool for Microsoft Word and other word processing users.
Preserving Format
When you convert an MS Word document to PDF and distribute it to other people, the document is preserved. Unlike when distributing an MS Word document, it cannot be edited by those people who receive the PDF version of the document.
One major problem with documents in MS Word format is that how they look is dependent on the receiving computer users’ software. If the document user has a different word processing application, a different version of MS Word, or doesn’t have the same fonts installed, the document can look very different.
An MS Word doc to PDF converted document will retain the format that it was created in. All users of that document will see exactly the same document no matter what hardware or software they are using.
Paperless Advantage
Storing documents as hardcopy or paper is now regarded as both a waste of resources and space. Printing itself is expensive and environmentally damaging. This makes the paperless office and document storage in digital formats desirable.
The problem is, what format should you store your paperless archive in? The problem is that you may have multiple formats making retrieval and viewing problematic. The answer to your paperless storage challenges is to choose one format for everything you need to preserve and that is PDF.
Version-Free
One of the challenges of sharing documents with MS Word is that MS Word’s versions change. This can cause compatibility problems. Older versions of MS Word and old documents can mean that compatibility issues arise.
PDFs are version-free. All PDFs can be opened by any PDF reader irrespective of age or origin. That’s a high level of independence for versions that is comforting to know.
Long Life
Hardware and software changes are a challenge. New versions and technologies seem to be happening with such frequency that keeping up is difficult. That’s fine if you are excited by new features and capability but a worry if you are interested in the lifespan of your documents.
PDFs have been with us for many years and certainly look like they will be for many years to come. They have been adopted as an almost universal standard by so many users that a long lifespan is certain.
There are so many legacy documents stored and continuously shared in PDF format that it’s very unlikely that a new format will take its place any time soon. Meanwhile, that commitment to PDF is increasing every day with more and more users creating more and more PDF documents.
Operating System Compatibility
You may not be able to determine what operating system the receivers of your document will be using. Fortunately, PDFs work perfectly well on PCs and Macs.
PDFs are also viewable on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Whether your users use iOS or Android operating systems on those mobile devices, the PDF documents are viewable.
Security
Security is an ever-present concern for computer users. Confidential information, personal details, and even banking and financial details are at risk of theft, loss, or corruption. It’s important to preserve the security of data.
Fortunately, PDFs can be password protected.
Small Is Beautiful
Storage capacity is a limited resource. Whether your file storage is on your own hard disks or you are using cloud-based storage, file storage costs money. That means the size of the files you store matters.
Large file formats are more expensive to store than smaller file formats. PDF files are typically more compressed than many other file formats. Better to store your documents as PDF files than MS Word files if file storage capacity and cost of storage are a factor.
Simple to Use
Word processing applications have some very impressive features. When you open an MS Word document in the application, you are presented with a dizzying array of menus and icons. The options are so many and complex that only a trained user can happily work with the document.
A PDF viewer can be very simple. Reading the document is simple. Even some of the useful functionality such as annotation is very user-friendly. Intuitive icons make it accessible to most users.
Good With Non-Text Components
Do your documents contain any non-text elements? Images, graphs, and other non-text elements are very reliably preserved by PDF formatted documents. This can’t always be said of other formats.
If you embed hyperlinks in your documents, how they operate is important to you. A hyperlink in a PDF document will reliably open in the user’s web browser when clicked on.
MS Word to PDF Conversion
The case for MS Word to PDF conversion is a strong one. It’s a robust answer to the file storage and sharing challenges. That’s why it’s been so popular and will continue to be so.
Check out more useful articles about PDFs here.