How to Save a Document to PDF

PDF, or Portable Document Format, is extremely popular, because if you save a document as a pdf, it can be read by any operating system. The most popular and well-known pdf reader is Adobe Reader, but there are others as well, and you can find them by searching on “pdf reader.” PDF documents are identified by this familiar icon.

But what do you do if you have a Microsoft Word document that you want your friend to be able to read, and they only have Pages, or if you have Pages and your friend only uses Google Documents? What do you do if you want to create a document that you want other people to be able to read but not make changes to? The easy way is to create a PDF document.

If you have an Adobe professional product installed, you have this ability already. There are other products that provide this as well, Quicken is one of them. The way to tell if you can create a PDF document is to look at your printers, on a Windows machine (Macs have this ability natively, as do Linux systems). One of the printers will have a PDF designation. I’m going to explain what to do if you don’t see one.

You can do a search for a little program called Cute PDF Writer. This is a no-charge utility that will install a program that will allow you to print to pdf. Remember that phrase—“print to pdf.” During the installation process the installer will also ask for permission to install another little program, and tell it to do that.

After installation you will have another printer, called CutePDFWriter. When you need to save a document as a pdf, you just need to remember to “print” it to the CutePDFWriter, and you will be presented with a dialog box to give the document a name and a location to save it to.