There are many voices that will tell you that you should use PDF as your main format especially for work and office documents. Perhaps you are wondering why you should heed them and get yourself a PDF reader ASAP. In this article we shall see exactly what it is that makes PDF great as a format and why it’s so popular for official documents and important files. There are a few things that aren’t necessarily great about PDF as well, which is to be expected since nothing is perfect. However, you can judge for yourself whether or not the good overshadows the bad and if the setbacks are worth the rewards in your particular case. That being said, let us go over them so that you might decide for yourself how great PDF is as a format and how it can help you.

The good things we have to say about the PDF format

    • PDF is great because you can use it regardless of what kind of machine you are operating. It’s ability to communicate with pretty much any type of device out there. More than that, it will also support most operating systems. This is a great win for PDF because it allows users to freely go about their business without having to fear a lack of compatibility and that would force them to adjust accordingly each time.
    • PDF is great because it is easy to use and it’s even easier to install. Most times, the software from Adobe will even come preinstalled on the machine you are using but if not it will only take a moment to install it or any other PDF manipulation software out there.
    • PDF is great because the files that it creates are preserved at a very low size which means that the format is extremely space efficient and will maximize productivity especially on machines with limited storage options.
  • PDF is great because it can be protected a lot better. It comes with the option of instating security measures for the different activities related to PDF files like printing them or even editing them. So if you so desire you can have people need to present their security clearance before being able to permanently rotate pdf files for example.

The not so good things that we have to say about the PDF format

    • Some PDF editing software isn’t free and if you want access to all the features and not just the basic stuff, you’ll have to pay for them.=
    • PDF might be easy to edit on its own, but it does require you to have special software that can read it while other files can be much more easily edited without the necessity of extra software.
  • The fact that text can be perceived as images in the PDF format can be great but also a burden for those trying to edit them, making it a con for the PDF format.