PDF Tips and Tricks Every Business Owner Should Learn About

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Five Stages of Business Growth (25-slide PowerPoint presentation). This presentation introduces a framework for entrepreneurs to use when building and navigating their business from a nascent, startup state to an enterprise with a global footprint. This framework, called the 5 Stages of Business Growth, is based on the fact that all businesses experience common [read more]

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PDFs are widely used in the business world, so being able to harness them as efficiently and effectively as possible should obviously be a priority.

To help you achieve this aim as part of your wider digital transformation goals, here are just a few handy hints and hidden tricks to try out when you are next faced with a PDF file as part of your daily duties.

Online converters make changing the file type easy

While you probably know that you can use programs like Microsoft Word to save existing documents as PDFs, it is also worth taking advantage of web-based file conversion services to alter the format.

For example, if you have a PDF that you want to turn into a Word document, you can do so quickly and efficiently via this link. You can also carry out bulk conversions, which is ideal for those with larger workloads to handle, and since there is no need to download and install software locally to do this, it is a risk-free process.

Merging files is straightforward

Rather than having to wrangle lots of separate files at once, you can use Adobe Acrobat to merge files into one PDF that can then be accessed and shared with ease.

To do this, just open the File menu and choose the Create sub-section, then select Combine Files into a Single PDF and you will be able to blend together whatever documents you want without needing to do a lot of manual copying and pasting.

Adding security measures is sensible

Sometimes you will want to protect your PDFs from prying eyes and ensure that only the right people have access to them. There are a number of settings you can put in place to achieve this, each of which is found in the Protection sub-section of the Tools menu in Acrobat.

The levels can be altered according to your needs; for example, if you want to make a document viewable only to people with the right credentials, or editable only to a select few while it can be viewed more generally by others, then these changes can all be implemented in a jiffy.

Advanced searches are your friend

Finding individual words or phrases in a PDF is probably something you already do, but it is worth exploring the features of the Advanced Search function from within the Edit drop-down. This is the best way to pinpoint elements of a document that might otherwise be more elusive, such as discrete topics and content contained within lists and tables.

Page extraction is straightforward

Breaking down PDFs into separate files is just as simple as merging them. This may come into play if you have a single page you want to isolate, which you can do by picking the Extract option from the Pages menu within the Tools drop-down.

There are lots more things you can do with PDF documents and the software that supports them, so be willing to tinker to get the most out of them.

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