On our web site and in our marketing materials we’ve used words like ’streamlined’ and ‘easy-to-use’ to describe the PDF creation functionality we support in our range of products. I thought I’d try to explain what we really mean when we say it and why it can be important to you if you regularly create PDF files from Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Visio. (If you’re really interested, you can read our marketing team’s description of our creation functionality at our PDF creator page. Exciting stuff!)
If you go and do a search for pdf creator or create pdf files at Google, you’ll see a bunch of tools to create PDF files. The majority of these creators will let you convert common office documents into PDF files. In fact, because they work as a simple print driver, using them you can convert just about any file that prints.
So why do we even need Nitro Pro, you ask? Because unlike almost all these converters, our software gives you ‘streamlined’ creation. OK, I know I’m not getting any closer to explaining the key point of this article.
Let’s take another tack. Take a look at how an average PDF printer driver works:
- Open your file to to convert to PDF
- Go to the File menu
- Open the Print dialog
- Select the print driver that will convert to PDF
- Choose your settings
- Press OK
- Choose the desination and name the file.
- Press OK.
I think you’ll probably see what I’m getting at: there’s a lot of steps in there.
For organizations that want keep training to a minimum and reduce employees wasting their time with tedious tasks, quicker and easier PDF tools are a must. This is where streamlined creation comes in.
Streamlined PDF creation allows you to bypass just about all these steps, batch convert, and combine different types of files together in the one PDF creation task.
This is where business professional-focused tools such as Nitro PDF Professional and Adobe Acrobat start to stand apart from the basic creators. If you look at the screenshot below as an example, a user can grab a bunch of different files, put them in the order which they should be combined, and click Combine. That’s reduced the steps above (required for each document you convert) into just three or four. Or another way of streamlining is to grab a bunch of files and drop them into Nitro Pro for immediate, automatic creation.
The reason why I started off this post mentioning converting Microsoft Visio and Publisher to PDF was because there’s such an assumption these days from business professionals for there to be some sort of streamlined creation for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, whereas the less popular formats such as Publisher, Visio and WordPerfect tend to be forgotten.
If you’re currently using Nitro Pro and haven’t tried out the functionality. Check out this page in our online user guide to walk yourself through it:
- How to batch convert to PDF / How to convert to PDF via folders
- How to convert Microsoft Publisher to PDF files
- How to convert Microsoft Visio to PDF files
