Why It Is Better To Use PDF Instead of Word or Excel Documents?

PDF or Portable Document Format is one of the most commonly used file formats of the day. It is not only used in many business industries such as legal, medicine, real estate, etc but there has also been an increase in its use in schools, colleges, universities, and small businesses. 

PDF was developed by Adobe in the 90s and it became popular around 2008 when it was released by Adobe as an open standard and the file format was adopted around the world and became so much popular. 

The reason why PDF became so popular and was heavily adopted by almost every industry is that it has many advantages over other file formats, be it Word, Excel, or Powerpoint, PDF has just so much to offer than these formats that people loved using it and it has become an industry-standard nowadays. 

Let’s have a look at some reasons Why It Is Better To Use PDF Instead of Word or Excel Documents:

1. Universally Compatible 

PDF file format became an open standard in 2008 and since then, the file format was heavily adopted by different industries and sectors around the world. Nowadays, you would find extensive support for PDF in all kinds of apps today.

Most of the modern operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Mac come with pre-installed apps that are capable of opening PDFs. Plus, most modern-day browsers are also fully capable of opening PDF files with ease.

There are also so many different PDF tools and editors available online using which you can easily merge PDFs, compress PDFs, convert PDF into other formats such as Word, Excel, JPG, etc or convert other file formats into PDF such as JPG to PDF or Excel to PDF. There are just so many tools available for PDF that using it for personal use or business use is just no problem at all.

2. Portability

It is given right in the name of the format, portable document format, and PDF is portable than other document formats out there. You can transfer or move files & information in the PDF without having to worry about anything.

In other file formats such as Word Doc or Excel, you open the document only to see the whole format and layout of the document messed up or a warning saying that some fonts are missing in the document or some images are missing. These warnings can be very annoying but with PDF that is not something that you have to worry about.

Once a PDF file is created, it remains as it is and can be shared with anyone and all the contents of the document such as fonts, images, tables, and all the formatting will remain as they are, nothing will be changed or missing. 

Also Read: Make Your PDF Organized with Page Numbers Using PDFBear

3. Reliability

Another thing that makes PDF file format better than its counterparts is its reliability. When you create a PDF file then it contains both text elements and non-text elements such as images, vector graphics, tablets, etc but PDF will always display the data in the exact same way no matter which device or platform you are viewing the PDF one.

This makes PDFs one of the most reliable formats to export documents and present data the way you made the document. Your data is conveyed in exactly the same way that you intended it to.

4. File Size Reduction

File Size Reduction is a huge advantage that PDF file format has over its counterparts. PDF easily allows you to decrease the size of the file by lowering its quality. 

Since both text and non-text elements can be added into PDF, you may sometimes work with PDFs that contains a lot of visuals such as images, graphics, animations and these files usually have large file sizes and you might run into issues because of the large file size since most services have a file-size limit and don’t allow you to upload files above a certain file size.

In such cases, you can easily decrease the quality of PDF files and make them smaller in size. This will help you to easily send the files without having any size issues.

Also Read: Finest PDF Editors – What are the Spectacular Options Of These Pdf Editors

5. Version Independence

There were times when you received or sent a .docx or .ppt file to someone then you weren’t able to open it because it is not compatible with the software version that you have installed on your PC. Either the file is from an older version or a newer version and cannot be opened through the software that you have installed on your PC but that is not the case with PDFs.

PDFs are universally compatible and you can open any PDF file from any version in any PDF reader because PDF doesn’t have the problem of version incompatibility.

These were some of the advantages that PDF file format has over its counterparts. Of course, there are also many other benefits of using PDFs and if you are not using PDFs then perhaps it is time for you to embrace PDFs and start using them instead of other file formats.