One of our more senior Rugby chaps John H has been sending out fixture information in Word documents. As he's got the latest edition of Word 2007, some of the distribution list were emailing back that they couldn't open the document. Aside from a hurried re-distribution or call for technical help, he also runs the risk that folks won't open a Doc file. Word Documents can contain all sorts of nasty viruses and bad stuff. Not that he would intentionally distribute a virus, but "stuff" does happen. For example, we distribute our MSFW Newsletter in a PDF format which most people can read (or print out and take down the Golf Club or Bar to share).

The Adobe PDF document format is pretty common with a free PDF viewer available straight off the Adobe site. Just look for that symbol above. This allows you to view PDF documents from disk or native within your favorite web-browser.

How to print documents to PDF format!

One excellent and free utility our IT department recommend is called PDFCreator. Free (genuinely) from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ this installs as a Windows Vista or XP Print Driver which you can select from Word, Excel, etc. when ready to print. The printer looks like this when installed under (XP) Printers and Faxes. English Guy even has this as default. Saves paper, eh.

When you print your document, spreadsheet (or anything) to PDFCreator this pops a print-dialogue box on screen where you can click to E-Mail or Save to disk. The E-mail button will create a new mail item and automatically attach the PDF ready for sending. Other more technical functions allow you to capture a bunch of documents into a single combined PDF document. For example, this could be a collection of web-pages, spreadsheets or documents, any mix of source document.

Download the Free PDFCreator from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/.