In the midst of summer season I have been frustrated recently when some suppliers have sent me email attachments I could not open, one was produced on a Mac and another a much older word format.

A little bit frustrating but also time consuming as I had to ask the suppliers to resend in another format. It made me think back to an article Liene from Think Splendid wrote that changed my life, ok a tad dramatic but true! Back in March 2008 she wrote an article urging us to send email attachments as PDF’s (portable document format)  Provided your client has the free download enabling them to view PDF’s, then they can open it, and if not encourage them to download via here

As wedding planners we spend a lot of time ensuring our corporate image is just right from the font we use to ensuring our logo is on everything. So why then ruin that professional impression by sending a document they might not be able to open or if they do the formatting might be all out of sync. Also more importantly if sending a document as excel or word – they can amend it, fine if that is what you want them to do (i.e for budgets) but if not ensure it’s a PDF that they cannot change as easily.

Now before you all scream “but I don’t want to spend £500+ on adobe software” everyone can download a free application that enables you to create a PDF document, you wont be able to edit it, you have to use the original word/excel document first then resave your changes & PDF again.

Applications you can try:

PDF995 this is what I use and it’s so simple & easy to use.

PrimoPDF

Or apparently if you have a Mac the ability to create a PDF is built into the system – as I don’t have a Mac I’m going to trust Liene’s word on this and she is rarely wrong! We’d love to hear your views, do you always send PDF’s or are you guilty as charged?!