There are several reasons to print tables from our beloved risk calculation workbooks to Adobe Acrobat pdf format.  For some projects, clients have been requesting all deliverables to be in pdf format.  In others cases, the risk assessor may wish to submit (externally or internally) the risk calcs in format that cannot be changed. 

You can print from Excel to pdf format in several ways.

1. Obtain a copy of Adobe Acrobat (not the Acrobat Reader that each CH2M Hill computer has installed).  Adobe Acrobat is not COE software application; you need a project number to get IT to buy a copy (or you need to buy it yourself). Once Adobe Acrobat is installed, there is a button in Excel that allows you to direct your printing output to pdf format OR you can select the Adobe pdfMaker or Adobe Distiller from the list of printers. For example, see Recommendations for Creating PDF Files in Excel 2000 with Acrobat 5.0 or http://www.eugmoss.net/pdf_files_help.htm.

2. There are some 3rd-party pdf makers that you can get that are cheaper than the full version of Adobe Acrobat. You can download a pdfMaker application for Word 97 from the Adobe site . Does not help with Excel though!  There are various 3rd-party tools - that are free but I don't know how well they work - at PlanetPDF.

TIP: If you want to print an entire workbook (by select all your worksheets of interest rather than printing each worksheet separately) from Adobe Acrobat v. 4 and 5, and you have pages with different page orientation (i.e., a mix of portait and landscape), you need to first print to PostScript and then use Adobe distiller to create a pdf file.  For version 6, they solved the page orientation problem but everything needs to have the same print quality setting (i.e., 300 dpi or 600 dpi).

I personally have a copy of Adobe Acrobat 6 - it was released last week.  It has several key improvements, is easier to use, and appears to be faster.

Cheers!

Mike Bedan

34 - 11:07:06 AM    comment []   - See Also:  tips - Tools-Models    (Google It!)