Thinking of converting your Word documents to PDF documents? If so, you must read about the advantages and disadvantages of PDF. Actually, PDF is short for Portable Document Format. As the name suggests, it is a type of file format. Most of the books you can find online are distributed in this format. Creating a PDF file only takes a few clicks. Let’s learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of this file format.

Advantage:

Sure

Worried about the important draft that you want to protect for sharing over the Internet? If so, you can add watermarks, use passwords, and encryption techniques. You can take advantage of all these features by creating a PDF file. Depending on the material you want to send over the Internet, you can choose the appropriate security measures.

Compress large files

Suppose you have a large room with many cabinets. In each cabinet, you have hundreds of files that you need to organize and archive. Suppose you need to send the files to an employee. How difficult will it be? Well, it will be a nightmare.

PDF can make your life so much easier. You can save all your documents on your computer’s hard drive. You can then edit or password protect these files to send them over the Internet. You won’t have to deal with large files as the portable document format allows you to compress large files.

Autonomous

Files stored as a portable document format are self-contained, which means that the files do not depend on the software, hardware, or operating system that was used to create the document. This means that the document can be transmitted between different computers and devices without any problem. The look and feel of the document will remain intact. The source document cannot be modified unlike Word documents.

Disadvantages:

More difficult to edit

In a PDF document, the information is difficult to work with. Basically, files stored in this format cannot be edited that easily. On the other hand, Microsoft Word documents are much easier to edit. Actually, a PDF file is a kind of image of the document and editing it is almost impossible.

But there is a solution to this problem. You can convert PDF document to Word document. There are some websites that offer this service for free.

The types of PDF files

Creating a portable digital archive takes a few clicks. Although there are several types of PDF files, the method of creating them is not very different from each other. There are two types of portable digital files: scanned PDF and native PDF. The latter is a file that is made from a file that has been electronically processed. On the other hand, the other format is created by scanning a document with the help of a scanner. So these are the two most popular formats.

Simply put, if you are looking for a way to protect the appearance and increase the security of your documents, be sure to check out the PDF format.