Welcome to Shaun Luttin's public notebook. It contains rough, practical notes. The guiding idea is that, despite what marketing tells us, there are no experts at anything. Sharing our half-baked ideas helps everyone. We're all just muddling thru. Find out more about our work at bigfont.ca.

A workflow for editing & emailing a MS Word document as a PDF.

Tags: 2014-106ET, ms-office, email

Overview

  1. Open Email.
  2. Insert Attachment to get to document.
  3. Edit document.
  4. Export as PDF.
  5. Attach PDF.

Create or Modify Your Document in MS Word

This is where you will do general modifications. For example, you will move images and change rates. We’ll do client specific changes later.

  1. Create or open a document in MS Word.
  2. Make your changes.
  3. Save and close your document.

Attach the PDF to an Email in MS Outlook

This is where you create the email that will receive the attachment. This is the main part of your workflow.

  1. Create an email (you know how to do that).
  2. Click INSERT > ATTACH FILE.
  3. Find the document that you want to attach. Stop. This is where it gets different.
  4. Right click the document, choose Edit.
  5. The document will open in MS Word.
  6. Make specific customizations for the customer.
  7. Click FILE in the top left corner > Choose EXPORT.
  8. Choose Create PDF/XPS Document.
  9. The Publish as PDF or XPS dialog window will open.
    • Note the location that you’re saving the PDF. (E.g. Users > Admin > Documents).
    • Note the File name (E.g. Something-SomethingElse-PDF).
    • Feel free to change both/either the location and filename as appropriate.
  10. Click Publish.
  11. The PDF will open for you to preview. Do so then close.
  12. Repeat steps 6 to 11 until you’re happy with your PDF.
  13. Close the Word document with or without saving.
  14. You will see the Insert File dialog window.
  15. Click the PDF you just saved, then click INSERT.