One of the great benefits of running an IT support service for accountants is the raw material the questions give me for my newsletter and the other articles I write. Hopefully, the fact that the questions come from fellow accountants helps keep the content relevant and practical. This is one such answer to a real question. One of my clients wanted to send part of a worksheet from a complex Excel workbook to a client. They wanted to send it in a format that made it a bit less easy to ‘mess up’ than a standard Excel workbook and were aware that Excel 2007 could save a workbook directly as a PDF file. If you click on the Office button and hover over ‘Save as’ then one of the options that should appear to the right is 'PDF or XPS'. If your version of Office seems to be lacking the ‘Save as PDF’ option then you can either install Service Pack 2 or later which includes the capability or, for versions prior to Service Pack 2, download the free add-in.
In Excel 2010 the procedure is similar but not identical. For a start, Microsoft have at least seen the error of their ways and acknowledged that the anonymous Office button was not a good idea. The ribbon now includes an additional tab with the word ‘File’ on it. This provides access to a ‘Save as’ option but you will need to change the ‘Save as type’ option to PDF. Alternatively, you can click on the ‘Share’ option and ‘Create PDF/XPS document’ will appear as an option – this will take you to the ‘Save as’ screen but with PDF already selected.
So, whichever way you get there, turning the whole active sheet into a PDF is straightforward, but what about a selected area? Once you have got to the Save as dialog with PDF selected as the file type there will be an ‘Options’ button. Click on this to allow you to specify exactly what you want to send to your PDF file:
As you can see, you can choose to limit the output to a given range of pages and to choose whether to print the selected area, the Entire workbook, the Active sheet or sheets. If all or part of a table is selected, then the Table option will also be available. You can also choose to ignore any print areas that have been set. It is also possible to choose what non-printing information to include and whether to make the resulting PDF compatible with the international standard on long term archiving of documents.