Working with PDFs: Tools and Resources

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On the modern Internet, PDFs have become a standard and very common way for people to share information. Since they are an easy way for someone to capture information from any application (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.) and share it with anyone else, they are used quite frequently on websites.

A great example is in the restaurant industry. Many restaurant websites feature their menu as a separate PDF file, rather than present the information as a built-in page on their website.

Other ways that PDFs are used online include registration forms, flyers, bulletins, and more.

In the business world, there is often a big need to work with PDF files. In my experience, I’ve often been asked questions about PDFs from the people I work with. Most often, these questions are things like converting a Word or Excel file to a PDF, making edits to a PDF, etc.

I currently have the full version of Adobe Acrobat installed on my computer, so for me to work with PDFs is relatively simple to do. But a lot of other people I work with don’t have that full version on their computer – so what usually happens is I get asked to convert files to PDFs for them.

So for those out there who work with PDFs quite often but don’t have the luxury of the full version of Acrobat, this brief list of some tools, both online and not, will be useful for you.

These resources were originally compiled in a blog posting called “Mastering PDF: 80 Free Tools, Tips, and Resources” written on Hongkiat.com.

Online Tools

• FreePDFConvert – Convert commonly used files such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, and more to PDF, and vice versa.
• Web2PDF Online – Allows visitors to blogs and/or websites to save that particular page as a PDF file.
• PDFIt – An extension for Firefox that allows you to convert any page on any website you’re looking at into a PDF file.
• Google Docs – A free, web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application offered by Google. It allows you to download the file you create as a PDF. This is a great option for someone who doesn’t have Microsoft Office or any standard word processing/spreadsheet/presentation software on their computer.

Offline Tools

• doPDF – This little application installs itself as a virtual printer on your computer, so you can print any file or e-mail into a PDF.
• PDF to Word Converter – A desktop document conversion tool to convert a PDF file to Word document – and it’s free!
• PDF Creator – A tool you can download that easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in any Windows application.

As a reminder, if you don’t have the latest version of the free Adobe Reader installed, you can visit the Adobe website to download it today.

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