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September 2009
When it comes to creating a non-editable document that anyone can read, Word has some built-in solutions, but they’re far from perfect. An Adobe PDF file is a great alternative because you can view and print it on almost any operating system and the Adobe Reader software is free from Adobe’s website (www.adobe.com). But, before we tell you how you can create a PDF in Word using a third-party utility, let’s run through our other options. We’ll start with the document shown in Figure A and demonstrate how different conversions alter it. To follow along with our example, download the file Conversions.zip from the URL given at the beginning of this article.
Get more great articles like this one!Sign up now for Inside Microsoft Word Online! Your own virtual help desk of must-have techniques, tutorials, and how-to articles. Word 2007 can create PDFs: If you use Word 2007, you won’t need a third-party utility to help you create PDF files from your Word documents. Just download a free add-in from Microsoft to add a Save As PDF option to Word 2007. For more information, check out the accompanying article titled “Word 2007 offers you PDFs in one click,” found in this issue.
Figure A:
We want to share our document as is, without allowing our readers to change the text or layout.
 Protect your document Word’s Form Protection feature allows you to protect your document from changes, either in specific sections or in its entirety.
1.
With your document open, select Tools | Protect Document from the menu bar.
Get more great articles like this one!Sign up now for Inside Microsoft Word Online! Your own virtual help desk of must-have techniques, tutorials, and how-to articles. 2.
In the Protect Document task pane, as shown in Figure B, specify the type of protection you’d like to implement.
3.
Click Yes, Start Enforcing Protection to open the Start Enforcing Protection dialog box.
4.
Assign a password to prevent anyone from making changes without permission, and click OK.
Figure B:
The type of protection you enforce determines whether a recipient can edit all or parts of your document without permission.
 Get more great articles like this one!Sign up now for Inside Microsoft Word Online! Your own virtual help desk of must-have techniques, tutorials, and how-to articles. Now, when a recipient opens the protected document, it looks just like the original version, but he can’t make changes without providing the password. Document protection drawbacksTo view your document, your recipient needs Microsoft Word installed (or the Word viewer), so document protection leaves you with a limited audience. Additionally, anyone using Word can simply select the document’s entire contents by pressing [Ctrl]A, and then copy and paste them to a new document — easily circumventing your roadblock. To see how the protected document works, check out the file FTI 2007 Resolutions.doc in the Zip file we listed at the beginning of this article.
Get more great articles like this one!Sign up now for Inside Microsoft Word Online! Your own virtual help desk of must-have techniques, tutorials, and how-to articles. Need the Word viewer? If you send a Word document to someone who doesn’t use Word, she can still view the file as long as she has the Word Viewer installed. The latest version, Word Viewer 2007, is available from the Microsoft Downloads website (www.microsoft.com/downloads) and is compatible with Word 97-2007 files. However, if you use Word 2007, you’ll also need to install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. You can download this pack free at the Microsoft Downloads website as well.
Web page to the rescue? When you save your document as a web page for easy viewing by any web browser, you can share it without worrying about whether your recipients have Word installed. However, anyone can edit it with Notepad or any other text editor. Additionally, depending on the version of Word you use and the web browser your recipient uses, your finished web page may not look like you meant it to, as shown in Figure C. You can see the results by checking out the file FTI 2007 Resolutions.mht in our download file.
Figure C:
The HTML file generated by Word doesn’t preserve the position of our graphics and text, so elements end up out of place.
 Get more great articles like this one!Sign up now for Inside Microsoft Word Online! Your own virtual help desk of must-have techniques, tutorials, and how-to articles. PDF is the answer Word 2003 and earlier doesn’t have a built-in option to save a document as a PDF file, but plenty of third-party programs can take on the task, include Adobe Acrobat. At around $299, Acrobat is an expensive option, so you might want to try one of the free PDF converters available on the web. We’ve listed several programs in Table A; some are applications you download to your computer, and others are online converters (you upload your document and download the converted PDF).
Figure Table A:
Free PDF creators
We used the program CutePDF to convert our Word document to a PDF. The conversion worked well, as you can see in Figure D, but the background graphic is a much smaller, paler version of our original. You may want to try more than one program to see which works best for you. To view our finished PDF file, check out FTI 2007 Resolutions.pdf in our download file.
Figure D:
Our PDF conversion worked pretty well, but the background graphic is almost impossible to see.
 Get more great articles like this one!Sign up now for Inside Microsoft Word Online! Your own virtual help desk of must-have techniques, tutorials, and how-to articles.
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Please be aware of our copyright policy. © 2009 Eli Journals, a division of Eli Research, Inc. ("Eli Research"). The content published on this site ("Content") is the property of Eli Research or its affiliates or third party licensors and is protected by copyright law in the U.S. and elsewhere. |
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