How to Save your PowerPoint Files as a PDF {safely and beautifully}

Back in January I blogged about how to flatten your PDF files. Although that information is still useful, I have a new route or way that I am doing things these days. I find myself on YouTube often watching how-to videos posted by other people - usually some teenager who lives on the other side of the world and I am so thankful to have his help!

I have a few friends who are thinking of starting their own adventure on TpT this summer... so this is for you!

Today I want to share two main tips:

1. How to get rid of that white border you will find when saving a PowerPoint file to PDF.
2. How to make sure your PDF file is secure (and flattened)

White Border Issues....
Before with the icky border:

These Farm Rules are available on Teachers Pay Teachers just click {HERE}

And after...much better:

First of all, when making cute things for TpT I highly recommend using PowerPoint instead of Word or Pages or really instead of anything else! However, I am open to new things if you have a program I should try! I use a Mac, but because PowerPoint is PowerPoint these steps will work for PC users, but your screen make look a tad different.

After creating my work I click on File "Page Setup"

If you don't have that option due to the version of PowerPoint you have then click on File-Print and then Page Set Up:

And then:

Next, you want to set the width to 11 and the height to 8.5 (Unless your work is portrait in which case you will do width 8.5 and height 11) It is probably pre set to 10 and 7.5.

Then click OK. Now, on my Mac it gives me this warning- Click "OK"

And see how they have highlighted the "Fix"box, but don't click that! If you do, it will basically just undo what we did. This feature is set up so that if we were truly printing it would protect anything from being cut off, but we are saving to a PDF.

Now you have eliminated that white border!

On to the next step...saving the file with security options. In the January post I referred to I mentioned Michelle at The 3AM Teacher. It was her post in November that informed me that you need to take extra steps to secure your files.

So let's do it...
You should still be in the Print Screen from the above steps. If not, go to Print and click the PDF button on the bottom left that says PDF:

We are going to "Save as PDF" Now give your file a name and click "Security Options"

Be sure to click "Require password to copy text, images and other content" You don't want to do either of the other options because then if you put this on TpT or another site people won't be able to open or print the document without a password from you.  

After you do this click Save.... and Ta Da!! You have a border-free, secure PDF file.

Mac Users.... one more tip! If you ever need to combine PDF files make sure you open your PDF in Preview. Don't just click "Open" but instead click "Open With" and choose Preview. Below is a link to an article I found that helped me when I couldn't get this to work.

Macintosh How To Merge PDF Files in OSX

Good luck!