7 Reasons Why PDF Format Is Used Everywhere

Documentation is important for a superior workflow. If you want to ensure that you track all things in your professional workflow, you have to ensure that you are using official documents. The difficult thing about paper documents is that taking care of them is difficult. You cannot store these documents for years to come as they easily get tough to maintain over the years.

Many things have changed with the advent of computers and the internet, and document creation has also changed. PDF format, the leading document creation format, has made it easier than ever before to create and manage documents. Here in this article, we will tell you the four reasons why PDF format is so famous, so keep reading!

Do You Know How PDF Became So Popular?

Early in the 1990s, when Microsoft Office had already existed for years, it was difficult to share documents among different devices and systems, so a file format that retained the formatting was urgently needed. The PDF format was invented by Adobe at that time and made a significant difference.

However, the PDF file did not catch on immediately, but after the free Adobe Reader software became available in 1993, just a few months after its release, it gained a great deal of popularity and adoption. The Adobe Reader application had been downloaded online more than 100 million times by 1999.

PDF was popularized not just by the free software and technical advantages, but also by an important early adopter we all know–the IRS.

It used to be difficult for the Internal Revenue Service to work with the US Postal Service, which meant mailing more than 100 million paper documents every year until the PDF arrived. As a result, Americans and the IRS are having headaches due to lost forms, shipping errors and misfilings.

Hence, you can understand why the IRS adopted PDF forms so early in government history. Tax forms were distributed by the IRS as PDFs in 1994, so people could fill them out digitally and print them out immediately. Now, you can sign and submit PDF tax forms online to become completely paperless.

Why is PDF Still Popular Today?

1. Portability

As its name implies, PDF files are portable. It means that they can easily be transferred or moved around without the need for dependencies. Have you ever had the experience of opening a Word document and finding a warning saying that some fonts were missing? Or perhaps you have had the experience of missing images from a PowerPoint presentation. With PDFs, you do not have to deal with any of these issues. PDF files can easily be shared with anyone, and fonts, images, tables and formatting are all transferred as well.

2. Security

A PDF file can be securely protected with a password, preventing anyone who is not authorized to see the contents from it. If a PDF file is password-protected, it can only be viewed by entering the correct password. It is easy to share or transfer PDF files over email or messaging apps once you learn how to password protect them. PDF Expert for Mac even lets you share a file directly through the Export dialog box. Alternatively, you can remove a password from a PDF file if you remember its original password.

3. Effortless Creation

Creating documents should always be easy for everyone in your team. If only 2-3 persons in your office know about creating documents on computers, then it means that all the workflow has to be managed by few people.

The best thing about the PDF format is that everyone in your office can use it without prior training. Another added benefit is that you can change many famous file formats to PDF effortlessly. For example, if you want to convert an infographic in the image format, then you can easily convert the JPG to PDF using online formats.

4. Easy Formatting

Proper formatting plays a key role in the readability of a document. If you are using a format that is easy to create and has a small size but extremely difficult to format, you are working with the wrong format.

One of the main reasons people use the PDF format is that it is effortlessly easy to format. You can pick any document in PDF format and can format it the way you want. This amazing formatting compatibility has enabled people worldwide to make their documents look great on all computers.

5. Superb Editing

Editing documents is a go-to need for all businesses. No document can be treated as a “Law,” and offices have to make changes daily. If editing a document format is not easy, it means that handling it would be difficult.

The superior benefit of using the PDF format is that it is superbly easy to edit. You don’t need to use any specific editing skills like coding to edit PDF documents. You can easily pick any PDF editor to change formatting, texts, or so on in your documents.

6. Compact Size

The size of documents should always be smaller so you can fit as many files on your computer as you can. There are many document formats out there, but not all of them can be used for documentation. The amazing thing about using PDFs is that they allow you to fit so much information in them.

You can store thousands of PDF files in your local storage without slowing down your computer. Compared to media-rich files like images and movies, PDFs are small-sized and can be easily shared among different devices online.

7. Universal Compatibility

Today, PDF files are widely supported in a wide range of applications since they became an open standard in 2008. Today, most modern browsers and operating systems are fully capable of opening and displaying PDF files, and most operating systems come pre-installed with simple PDF viewer applications. The PDF file can work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and look exactly the same.