For a long time, Adobe’s PDF file format has been the format for legal and business documents, largely because they most closely resemble their hardcopy versions — and because they can be locked down relatively easily so that no changes can be made. But while PDFs are great for producing accurate digital versions of paper documents, you can also very easily create a PDF out of an ordinary Word document as well.

Save a Word file to a PDF from Microsoft Word

As you might imagine, creating a PDF from a Word document is very easy when you do it using Microsoft Word.

On a desktop / laptop

• Open the document in Word.
• Click on File > Save as > Download as PDF.

On an Android device

• Tap on the three dots in the upper-right corner.
• Select Share as PDF.
• Choose where you want to share the file.

On an iOS device

• Tap on the three dots in the upper-right corner.
• Select Export > PDF.
• Name your new file and select where you want to save it.

Save a Word file to a PDF from Google Docs

If you use Google Docs instead and are faced with a Word file that you need to convert into a PDF, that’s not a problem. Google Docs can accommodate Word files quite nicely. And, once they are uploaded into Docs, it can spit them back as PDF files. However, the process isn’t quite as straightforward.

On a desktop / laptop

• Open a new document in Google Docs.
• Select File > Open > Upload (assuming the Word document is on your computer’s drive). Find your file and upload it.
• Go to File > Download and select PDF Document (.pdf).

Things get slightly more tricky on a mobile device because you can’t directly save a Word file to a PDF using the Google Docs mobile app. However, if you first save the file as a Docs format, you can then go on to convert it to a PDF.

On an Android device

• Open the document in (or share it to) the Google Docs app.
• Select the three dots in the upper-right corner.
• Tap on Share & export > Save As > Google Docs.
• Then go through the same steps, but this time you can save it as a PDF file.

On an iOS device

• Open the document in (or share it to) the Google Docs app.
• Select the three dots in the upper-right corner.
• Tap on Share & export > Save as Google Docs file.
• Go back to Share & export, but this time, select Send a copy > PDF.

Bonus: if you’re curious what PDF stands for, it’s the wildly exciting Portable Document Format.