Women Over Fifty

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately creating an eight-page newsletter in Microsoft Word 2007.  I am fortunate in that during much of my career I not only wrote new material, but I also had to do my own Word Processing.  There are ups and downs to that. 

The upside:

• Everything was formatted and set up just the way I wanted it
• Formatting was limited to whether or not I knew how to do it
• I now know an incredible number of programs for word processing

The downside:

• I spent a lot of my time doing word processing instead of writing
• I tended not to want to do some complicated rewrites because of the amount of effort involved
• The word processing software was chosen by my company and I just had to deal with it.

So, I know a lot about computer equipment and word processing software.  When it came to creating the newsletter, it just took time.  Time spent cajoling people to send in their stuff and time to do the word processing end of it.

My readership includes a lot of computer savvy people with email addresses so I can send the newsletter by email, saving a lot of money and a lot of my time.  A very tiny portion of the readership needs a paper copy.  I know enough about Outlook to create a group mailing list so I don’t have to type in everyone’s email every time.  I just do it in a batch.

I have Word 2007 - a word processing program that many people are reluctant to upgrade to.  That includes my readership, a group of writers who write because they love the work, not because they’re getting rich.  I was unwilling to work in an older version of Word to keep them happy.  Obviously the best solution was to send a PDF file.  Briefly, a PDF file allows any reader to read and print the file.  It requires Adobe Reader, but that’s free and easy to obtain on the web.

The big problem here was I didn’t want to purchase the Adobe Acrobat just to do a newsletter once a month.  Adobe Acrobat is a wonderful program, but it comes with a wonderful price.  It’s priced more for a company than for an individual.

Microsoft has saved my day!  They have Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS as a free download for owners of Word 2007.  I downloaded the program, it did its thing, and now I can send as PDF or save as PDF with no more trouble than sending a document to a printer.  If you have Word 2007, you can download it from this location.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

When I was at work and sometimes formatted entire books, I didn’t like Microsoft Word.  Now that I use it for home tasks, I love it.  I especially love it that I can do PDFs now with no trouble.

Marilynne

Legal Note:  All software mentioned here is copyrighted by their respective companies.