We live in an age of vibrant techno-diversity. We have computing platforms galore from Windows and Mac, to the countless variations of Linux. We have MS Office, and OpenOffice.org, and NeoOffice, and StarOffice, JOffice, Simdesk, and way more to choose from for our word processing and spreadsheeting needs. With all these different options and file formats and default font sets, it’s nearly impossible to ensure that a document on your screen, will look the same on the screens of those you send your doc to. What’s worse is you can’t even guarantee everyone will be able to open it! Grrr.
Enter the Portable Document Format, better known as PDF. PDFs are essentially a picture of your document, they preserve all of your original formating, fonts and embedded images into a single, compressed file that is easily shuffled this way or that via email. And what great is almost EVERYONE can open a PDF file. You don’t need to have any of the bevvy of available Office suites, or a costly piece of software. These things are damn-near universal now.
If you ask me, for the purposes of sending documents out via email, PDF is the preferred file format. For the very reason that they are almost universally readable.
And now i’m going to show you how OS X makes PDF creation and emailing, unbelievably easy!
Scenario: You’re putting the finishing touches on a spreadsheet in NeoOffice you’ll want to email this document out and of course you’ll want each of the email recipients to be able to actually READ the document. Once you’ve proofread, and saved your file, here’s what you do.
1. Hit Apple + P or access the print dialog from the File menu.
2. Bottom left corner of the print dialog. You’ll notice a button simply labeled PDF. Click it.
Note: If you are using Panther it will just be a button labeled “Save as a PDF…”. Save it to your desktop and drag it into a new email.
3. You will find an array of useful PDF functions that you can choose from. For example “Mail PDF” which will automagically convert your current file into a PDF and toss it into a new email message for you! Go ahead and select “Mail PDF”
Once the PDF has been generated you will be whisked away to the Mail application and presented with something like the above image. A blank email with your PDF attachment already in it, just waiting for you to address and send off to many and varied far off places. All of which have the ability to open your PDF email attachment!
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