So if you ever had to do any writing, you know that one of the most daunting things you can encounter is the blank page. And we are looking at Acrobat right now as the blank page. In the previous lessons we talked a little bit about how to work with Acrobat and how to set Acrobat up. But we haven't actually created a PDF file. So we're going to focus on that now and we're going to use Acrobat in a variety of different ways to produce PDF from a variety of different sources.
One of the nice features about Acrobat that I like is this Create PDF button, it sort of your centrally located place to create PDF. But as it turns out we don't actually end up using it very often. So we're going to learn about ways to create PDF from files, from multiple files, from a web page and even from a scanned document that we pull from our scanner.
So without further due why don't we get right to it? So one of the easiest places is to create PDF from happens to be one of the more ubiquitous tools on the planet and that's Microsoft Word. So here I have a Microsoft Word file and I want to share with somebody and to reiterate the reason that I would convert this to a PDF is simple, I don't want anyone to be able to change it, I want it to look exactly to them as it looks to me. They may not have the same version of Word and in fact they might not even be on the same computer I am on.
So to convert it to a PDF file is actually very simple. All I need to do is simply select the Convert to Adobe PDF button. These are called the PDF makers and they are inserted or installed into Microsoft Word actually PowerPoint, Excel, Visio if you should have that Microsoft Project, Microsoft Publish or Microsoft Access, there is a whole bunch of them out there. They all really do the same thing and that is they give you a one button PDF creation from within your authoring application.
Why is that important? Well, simple because if I am working in an authoring application, I don't want to be jumping back and forth to produce a PDF. So to produce the PDF all I need to do is simply click the button and Acrobat will ask me, where I would like to save the file. And if I want to I can save it into my Lesson 03 folder. I am going to cancel this though because at this point I am not exactly sure the kind of PDF I am going to get. Now I don't mean that it's going to be an orange flavored PDF or a green PDF or something like that. But what I mean is how much compression is going to be applied, what kinds of settings can I apply to the process of creating this PDF to give myself a PDF that meets my needs.
And let's take a look at those because the other thing that Acrobat installs into Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and those other products that I mentioned is an Adobe PDF menu item. And from that menu item, I can select to change the conversion settings. And so we'll go ahead and do that. I should point out here that the change conversion settings menu is available only on the PC.
Now the settings come in two groups. One group of settings is how Word is going to produce the PDF, in other words what is going to come from specifically Microsoft Word into the PDF. And the other are PDFMaker conversion settings and that really drives the process of creating PDF and these conversion settings are something that get applied any time you produce the PDF.
And so let's those first, the conversion settings can be chosen from this menu here and you'll see that there are a variety of them. These are default settings that install with Acrobat and they kind of have to be there Acrobat sort of insists that they are there. And they give you what you would expect or they give you the basics for working with PDF or creating PDF.
So, for example, we have the Smallest File Size setting. What that's going to do is that's going to apply compression to the data that goes into the PDF file to give you a really, really tiny file. So, for example, if you had a lot of photographs in the document then it would apply compression to those photographs to give you a smaller document as possible. I am going to choose Standard here because this is a document that is really intended for a laser printer or may be a medium quality inkjet printer and so it'll kind of give me the best of both worlds. A little bit of compression but a little bit of quality left behind.
In the next lesson, we're going to learn how when we click the Advanced Settings button we can control those settings and create those settings. So for now let's focus on the rest of the functionality here in the PDFMaker dialog box. And really talk about the process of actually creating a PDF file.
In this case I have actually produced some custom settings that you'll learn how to do in the next lesson called total training. And those are the settings that I want to choose here. Since you don't have those settings, if you would like to follow along, choose the Standard settings. You will learn how to create your own custom settings in the next lesson.
There are also some other settings again that are specific to Microsoft Word that I want to take advantage of that are going to allow me to do some things that are pretty unique with the PDF once I have created it. First off, it's always a good idea to view the PDF result. You want to see what it's going to look like and it'll keep you from having to go poke around them look for because it'll simply pop open in Adobe Acrobat for you. It's also a good idea to prompt for the Adobe PDF filename. Now, if you don't do this the resulting PDF is going to pick up the file name of the original document and in this case the Word file and it's going to put in the same location. So in this case we have requisition report.doc, we'll end up with a file called requisition report.pdf.
Convert Document Information is something that's pretty important and we're going to learn more about how to use it when we talk about how to produce catalogs and indexes of PDF files. What this refers to is in Microsoft Word there are properties that you can associate with a file called metadata. Metadata just gives you the ability to do things like indicate keywords so that if someone were to search in the document, they can find the document based on keywords.
Again, we're going to learn how to do that a little bit later on. If you use document properties with Microsoft Word files then you should definitely convert them because then they will find their way into the PDF file. And you will be able to use it in ways that we'll discuss a little bit later.
