“Mail PDF” is a handy one as it saves the document as a PDF and automatically opens up a message with that attached.

The trick is to notice the “PDF” button on the lower left rather than to just click “Print” for a hard copy.Ĭlick on “PDF” and you’ll see that there are quite a few options: I bet you’ve seen this oodles of times in the past! The result is a familiar print dialog window: So cancel out of this particular “Save As…” and choose File > Print instead (or just use Cmd-P on the keyboard). Lots and lots of options, but since this is unique to the Word app, I prefer to tap into a more universal solution. Once you choose that, the resultant dialog box offers PDF as one of the output formats: Let me show you the official Microsoft way to save as PDF first.

Even if you just use the last name of the client there’s a good psychological security boost that everyone will appreciate. One thing it lets you do that I bet your boss would appreciate is to put access passwords on PDF documents, so that without the password it’s not readable.

In other words, when you go to print something, be it a document from Microsoft Office for Mac, a Web page, or an email, the print dialog box allows you to specify “Save as PDF” too, and that’s the best, fastest and most powerful way to proceed. Word has the ability to save in PDF format, as you’ll see in a moment, but I have to say that my preference for creating PDF on a Mac system regardless of the program is to use the printer driver. Modern PDF viewers allow you to annotate (as Preview does on the Mac, for example, allowing you to add virtual post-its of arbitrary length, circle items, etc) but won’t let clients actually change the source document. I completely understand how your boss is thinking with this and concur completely that it’s a best practice to work on documents in a word processor like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, then share the documents for commentary, annotation and approval in portable document format (PDF) form.

How to save doc as pdf on mac