I've been working to create a whole series of marketing slicks, one for each product or service MyRVAdvantage offers. Sales has been after us forever to get this done and it's now on my plate to make it happen. So the key is to make not get bogged down in the creation and layout and to make it super simple and easy for sales to distribute this documents to customers and prospects.
To speed up the process, and because I'm not the best graphical artist and have limited skilss when it comes to using super advanced layout tools like Photoshop or Illustrator I'm using MS Word to layout my marketing pieces. This way I can add and change easily until everyone approves the piece.
But then what? What happens with I'm done and want to distribute these documents. Word is not always a good choice. It's even more complpicated because I use Word 2007 on Vista and not all of our customers are up to date on Office so they might not be able to open it. Furthermore, I've spent a lot of time laying things out to look a certain way and each document contains "locked" information like specs and pricing. I certainly don't want someone to be able to move things around, or worse...change things and redistribute the documents to someone else.
Enter the Portable Document File or PDF from Adobe. PDFs allow me to control the layout and inforamtion and are widely used and accepted by almost everyone with a PC or Mac. Even if someone doesn't have the viewer, it's free and downloable from adobe.com. Perfect, exepct for one thing: how to I go from Word to PDF?
Foretunately there is a free add in for Office 2007 that allows my to "Save As" a PDF file. All I need to do is open my document in word, select "Save As" from the menu and select "Other Formats" then in the format drop down select PDF and click "Save". That's it...they save as PDFs, I didn't need to buy Acrobat and they look exactly as they did in Word.
What a deal. You can download this add in and try it out for yourself here: