Seven ways online businesses can benefit from using PDF software
Did you know more than 330 million people around Europe use PDFs? (Even the link to the statistics is a PDF).
With digital transformations changing every aspect of our lives, digital documents are becoming the next big thing to look after, and PDF is one of them.
Even though the humble PDF has wholeheartedly accepted today’s bring your own device (BYO) and adapted to the cloud computing world, online businesses are still resistant to adopting PDF software.
Gone are those days when PDFs were static and uneditable. Today, it’s synonymous with a user-friendly file format ideal for sharing across the internet. With businesses relying heavily on PDFs and straying away from traditional paper, PDF software is a must have.
While no one needs convincing about the benefits of using a PDF, an online business needs an extra push and convincing when using PDF software.
That’s why we’re here to help you convert your confusion into the adoption of PDF software. In this article, we discuss reasons why online businesses benefit from using it.
Seven ways online businesses can benefit from using PDF software
Most PDF software or tools have a design to help you get things done with accessibility and ease. Here are seven ways business benefit from using these tools:
1. Ensures time management and consistency
Does your business create many contracts, invoices, agreements, proof of income, resignation letters, and recommendation letters?
If yes, your team is probably wasting hours reinventing the wheel.
With 89% of employees wasting time at work, asking them to create these documents from scratch, you’re offering them another reason to waste time.
That’s where PDF software or tools come in.
These tools offer a myriad of best form templates that are customisable. You can tailor all these templates based on your specific needs. Apart from saving time, these templates help ensure consistency across every department.
If someone on the team is unfamiliar with the brand language, they might create an unprofessional document. Templates help in keeping the style and brand voice intact while giving you scope to make minor changes.
Downloadable templates from Smallpdf.
For instance, using a contract and agreement template from a PDF tool like Smallpdf drastically reduces your time.
Instead of spending one to two hours searching for the template’s content, you download the free template and edit it as per your requirement without worrying about the brand’s writing style and guidelines.
Pro-tip: With PDF tools, your team members focus on job duties that make a significant difference to your bottom line while making them productive and efficient.
2. Enhances workplace collaboration
Working on the same document while working with others is a common scenario in the digital workplace. Simultaneous file sharing and editing is a must-have as it significantly reduces the time spent reviewing a file.
Today, collaborative editing on PDFs has become the gold standard for working on documents.
PDF tools empower team members to edit, leave feedback, and comment on content, functionality, and graphics in one document. You can share this document with others, increasing workplace collaboration.
Interestingly, when running a project, your team submits hundreds of documents submitted for every angle. PDF tools help you transform your workplace collaboration and reach your business goals.
Pro-tip: PDF tools provide a quick way to streamline your workflow and ensure higher workplace collaboration.
3. Makes your documents interactive
By nature, interactive PDFs resemble your old PDFs - one that you commonly use in sales collaterals, eBooks, portfolios, and brochures. The difference lies in the level of interactivity, making them the epitome of engagement.
Interactive PDFs help you engage and amaze your employees and customers. With interactive content being two times more engaging than static content, an interactive PDF makes your document stand out from competitors and even increases your workplace efficiency.
That’s why companies rely on PDF tools to create interactive PDFs, allowing users to create forms where readers can click buttons and checkboxes.
Pro-tip: As interactive PDFs have an element that engages readers, it’s a popular choice for teachers and instructional designers.
4. Increases security
One of the biggest concerns in dealing with digital documents is their security. Anyone who has access to these documents can read and leak them.
Did you know the infamous Panama Papers scandal, involved a leak of a whopping 11.5 million digital documents, of which 2.15 million were PDFs.
PDF files leaked during Panama Papers scandal
With so much at stake, providing a secure PDF is more than necessary, so businesses turn to PDF tools.
These tools offer features such as encryption, protecting your sensitive content and documentation from notorious cybercriminals. PDF tools offer enterprise grade security features, including password protection and watermarks.
Such tools boast superior data protection and help a business preserve the confidentiality of documents you share outside the business.
PDF editors or tools help you add digital signatures and other identifying prompts before letting anyone access the PDF’s content.
Password-protected PDF file.
Locking a PDF with an unbreakable password ensures document and information security. With a PDF tool, you create owner-locked PDFs, restricting various features such as copying, editing, and printing.
Often, business handling complex and sensitive information use owner locked PDFs. Such files are viewable by others but not readily edited or copied without using a specialised software.
Pro-tip: If you forget your PDFs password, you cannot recover it from the PDF, so consider keeping a backup copy of the file which isn’t password protected.
5. Increases workplace organisation
Even with PDFs, document management and organisation is a perennial problem, especially for businesses using hundreds of digital files. Organising and sorting files is a time-consuming process.
Worse, different files might be jumbled together, making PDF organisation more challenging. In a dire effort to obfuscate critical information, you have hundreds of PDFs with only a few pages of relevant content.
When trying to organize digital files, companies often use the services of PDF software. This software helps you combine similar files into a single PDF. You can search, index, and track critical information.
Apart from improving workplace organisation, these tools improve the workflow in the following ways:
● Quickly organise information and merge this information to create folders of similar material.
● Consolidate internal records and merge the files to ensure specific use cases are available in one easy to consult resource
Pro-tip: With a few clicks, these tools condense multiple PDF files into one, increasing workplace organisation and file management.
6. Removes the clutter from the PDF files
Working with a PDF might be tricky, especially if you regularly delete or add pages to your file. When your PDF file contains unnecessary or outdated information, it adds to the size bloat.
Once your PDF size exceeds 25 MB, you cannot attach it to your Google email.
Merging PDFs using a PDF software.
These extra pages are a pain for your team because they scroll down the entire document when searching for information. They have to upload the document on a file sharing platform such as Google Drive or Dropbox to share the file link with others.
Rather than using another third-party file-sharing platform, it makes sense to delete the extra pages using a smart PDF tool.
With these tools, you erase entire pages of unwanted PDF documents in a blink of an eye.
Pro-tip: Deleting extra pages from your PDF increases organization, removes clutter, and ensures you stay up-to-date with information.
7. Allows you to highlight key points
Just like paper, it often helps to highlight key points to remember them and draw attention to them in a wordy text document.
This feature is helpful for teams handling a lot of paperwork and PDF files. It helps team members share in real-time for review or feedback, increasing collaboration.
Pro-tip: As PDF highlighting is often overlooked, ensure your PDF software offers a highlighting feature.
Using the PDF software to your benefit
Though PDFs were initially designed for displaying documents with HTML and image formats, today, they have come a long way.
Today, people expect PDFs to offer the same functionality as a Word document but without compromising on any in-built feature.
Tools like Smallpdf help you achieve this by providing features such as:
● Editing
● Merging
● Compression
● Converting
● Protecting PDF documents
The faster a business adapts to these tools, the easier it becomes to manage documents.
With PDF not going anywhere in the foreseeable future, using these tools gives your business an edge over others who reinvent the wheel whenever they make changes to their document.
Being resistant to this tool could be the difference between success and failure.
Author’s bio:
Priya Jain has been copywriting professionally for over eight years.
She teaches math, spends time running behind her toddler, and tries new recipes while she isn't writing. She has attained an engineering degree and an MBA. You can find her on LinkedIn.
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