Have You Ever Struggled To Edit A PDF Document?

If you work in an administrative role in any office in the world, you are likely to have used, read and opened a PDF document. PDF documents are essentially images to most people that access and open them through the most common means; Adobe Acrobat Viewer or Adobe Reader. The Adobe product provides any PC or Mac user the ability to open and read a PDF document, which is fine, if you don’t want to edit a PDF document.

The problem inevitably arises when you receive a PDF document that you yourself haven’t created. It may be sent to you on a USB memory stick or a business contact from an external company may have attached it to you in the form of an email. Regardless of where it has been received from, if all you have on your PC or Mac is Adobe Reader, you won’t be able to edit a PDF document.

Many people receive PDF documents that are read, printed, saved and filed and are no longer looked at again. But what about when someone notices a mistake on that PDF document? What about when your manager asks you if you can make a quick change to the formatting, spell that misspelt word correctly, or change the font of the text? If you can’t edit a PDF document how can you make the changes necessary?

PDF is essentially a format to make documents more secure. It is in place to ensure that any PDFs remain in a constant formatting so that no matter what operating system or Adobe PDF viewer is used, the formatting from the font to the positioning of the text (as well as the words and numbers in the text itself) will be consistent.

Many PDF documents are actually created from within a normal word processing piece of software such as Microsoft Word. How this works is quite simple; it uses a piece of software called a PDF printer (or something similar). Basically, you write the document within the word processor of your choice, ensure that you have all of the spellings correct, the correct font and diagrams are in place and where they need to be. Once you are ready you can then turn this into a PDF to be distributed to recipients of the document that may be external to your own company. (A PDF comes in particularly useful for quotes where you don’t want the numbers on the bottom line to be amended!) With the document ready you select print, and you print to a PDF. Essentially what this does is generate an exact replica of your word processed document in an unchangeable PDF format.

If you are the owner of a PDF document, to edit a PDF document then becomes very simple indeed. Simply open the original word processed copy of the document that you saved and edit away within your word processor. But what about if you aren’t the owner of the PDF document? What about if you can now only find the PDF version of the file and not the editable word processed one? In order to edit a PDF document in this scenario you will need to look online for software that you can either trial or purchase which allows the PDF file to be opened and edited as needed.