You have probably heard by now that SharePoint 2013 has native PDF support. If you haven’t, then your jaw probably just hit the floor. That’s right; we now have things like a PDF iFilter built right in for searching PDFs. Add in the new features of Office Web Apps 2013 and Office 2013 and you have options like “Print to PDF” directly from the document preview pane. Let’s go over how that looks and the steps necessary to complete.
Navigate to a library or web part of your choice storing the document in which you would like to convert to PDF. Then, select “…” to the right of the document to display the document preview screen.
Locate the Menu button on the lower right of the document preview. Click the button and here we find “Print to PDF”
Select “Print to PDF” – a conversion will now take place.
The document will be converted to PDF then stored and accessed from a word-view beta address (https://word-view.beta.officeapps.live.com/wv/WordViewer/request.pdf…). When you select “Click here to view the PDF of your document“, the converted PDF document will render in the browser and prompt printing options. You can cancel the printing options should you choose and access additional options like download, paging, zooming, etc. Simple as that! It’s about time, right!?
11/05/2012 at 11:00 am
Good work Adam.
11/05/2012 at 12:55 pm
Thank you!
11/28/2012 at 7:30 am
That was long overdue, cheers Adam.
11/29/2012 at 9:07 am
Hi, thanks for the valuble info. Do you know if it can convert InfoPath document to PDF as well?
11/29/2012 at 9:27 am
You are welcome! Thanks for visiting the site. I have not heard of that exact scenario yet, no.
01/31/2013 at 9:09 am
Great news! Have you seen whether or not the “print to pdf” option brings all the metadata over? My difficulty (since 2007) has been, if you create a doc library with custom columns (anything outside the normal MS document properties) and have a Word content type – fill out the extra custom metadata fields and then convert to .pdf. The custom metadata does *not* come over to the .pdf. All the general (standard) document properties come over, but none of the custom fields do. Makes an archiving solution rather difficult.
09/17/2014 at 6:44 pm
I wish there was an easy way to save IP forms as PDF. Not many users at our installation have Pro but have to attach the forms in other external applications so it’s a request I get a lot. We can’t use most third party tools since we’re a military base with very strict secturity.
10/08/2014 at 9:17 am
Is this an Enterprise -only feature?