How to save a Word doc as a PDF

It’s File / Save As…

Then a window like this will appear…
From File Format options, choose PDF.

In the screenshot above, from a Mac, the file location is accessed through ‘Favorites’ (seen on the left). The PDF will be stored in the same location as your source file, unless you specify otherwise.

On PCs the PDF will often immediately open once created unless you switch that setting off.

You can save Excel files and PowerPoint presentations as PDFs too (probably anything in the MS Office suite). For other file types the option give might be ‘Export as PDF’. See Zamzar below for converting other things to PDFs.

Further file conversion fun
PDFEscape is a free online tool that lets you do lots of things with PDFs. It’s aimed at Windows users but it seems to work fine on a Mac too. I’ve not used it to edit the text inside a PDF myself but have used it to combine two PDFs into one file: Converting a single A4 PDF into two A5 copies on one page

Zamzar will let you convert files into all sorts of formats (it’s amazing, never failed me yet). It works for documents, images, music, videos – even books, compressed files and CAD files (list of conversion types). You upload your file, it does the conversion then emails you when it’s done and you can download the converted file (which is later deleted from their servers).

Today I used http://t.co/rbAD5Zjy to convert a .png to a .pdf to print as an A1 poster. Worked very well so am recommending site.

— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) November 20, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

• Converting a single A4 PDF into two A5 copies on one page

@JoBrodie use aPDF editor – if you haven't got access to acrobat use a freebie; duplicate the page, then print off half size?

— Take That, Avogadro (@6x10E23) January 30, 2017

Solved with PDFescape which is a free PDF editing tool for Windows, I used the online version. (I think on a Mac you’d just use the Preview tool which lets you edit PDFs anyway).

The situation I was in with a one-page A4 PDF was A and I wanted to get two copies of it so that it printed out like B. I was missing a sort of duplication step which I thought I could fix in the File / Print stage, but apparently not.

1. Go to http://www.pdfescape.com/windows/ and click on the free online bit on the left, it looks like this

2. Choose how to get your PDF into PDFescape – I used the second option ‘Upload PDF to PDFescape’, clicked ‘browse’ to select though you can also drag and drop, and waited for it to load.

3. Click on Page in the menu on the left, then Append and upload a second copy of the same PDF*

*Can be a different one of course if you’re trying to add different PDFs together

4. Now you’ll have two pages, like this – click the little green button with white chevrons on it (see pic below) to download a copy.

5. Open the PDF on your computer with the free Adobe reader

6. To print two onto one sheet open the PDF and it’s File / Print then the options should appear

Page Sizing & Handling
Multiple
Pages per sheet = 2