Upload PDF files
Why PDF and not Word files?
Inconsistent displaying and printing
Word and other word-processing files are not designed to be 'exchanged' with others.
Their documents will display differently on each person's computer depending
on how that computer,
and the Word program is set up.
Word documents also record changes you have made so people can see your errors and
other information about your document, they could change the document themselves and
some parts of Word documents can carry viruses.
PDF files are portable
PDF stands for Portable Document Format, meaning they can be exchanged with other people and they will display as you intended.
How do I make a PDF file?
We recommend using Open Office. This is the same as Microsoft(MS) Office except it has a drawing program instead of a database program.
Everything else is basically the same as MS Word, MS Excel and MS Powerpoint.
The program is smaller than the MS version and it produces smaller files.
It will open MS files (such as Word) and you can save files in Word, Excel and Powerpoint formats.
You can also save files in PDF format by clicking the PDF icon - it's that easy!
Open Office is free-to-use software and I believe it is far superior to MS.
You can download Open Office from www.openoffice.org (it also comes in many languages)
More about Open Source software
Open source software is free and allows programmers around the world to submit improvements, fix bugs, improve performance, and add features.
It is a true 'community' endeavour which results in high quality software for all.
There are thousands of Open Source projects covering every conceivable type of program.
Many of them are better than commercially available software.
Almost all the software I use is Open Source. (Email, Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Browser, Graphics editing).
Thousands more can be found at http://sourceforge.net/
Here is a popular one you might like to use ...
Mozilla Firefox (Browser like Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera)
This is the best Browser I have ever used!
It is easy to use and has many fine features such as 'Tab Browsing' (multiple pages in one window accessed by a tab on the top of the window).
Updates are frequent and very simple to install and there are many useful 'add-ons'.
Changing to Firefox is very easy.
Keith Bateman March 2006