Oh no, it's a PDF!

Good old PDF, we started using it in 1993, more than 30 years ago! And it’s still here. You might think it’s because it’s so great, but I believe we’re just too comfortable to look for new formats. Whenever I see a PDF being sent or shared, requiring me to download it just to open, it feels frustrating. We went from the first airplane to the moon landing in just 66 years, yet PDFs are still sticking around, almost unchanged!

In the M365 environment where I work, as do most of us, we have some alternatives; I’m looking particularly at SharePoint Online (SPO). Within SPO, you can create Pages, which can serve as an intranet.

SPO Pages can display not only text and images, but also videos, countdowns, buttons/links, and eye-catching banners to engage audiences far more than a simple PDF! While SPO Pages can be printed as PDFs, no one really does this. Instead, you just bookmark the page, and when you need it again, you click the bookmark or use search to find it. This also prevents users from storing outdated information; whenever you need to make an update, you just do, and it’s instantly available.

SPO Pages can be edited by people you designate in your permission list, so there’s no worry about “anyone” being able to edit them—they can’t. Plus, if you’re maintaining documentation for a process, hopefully, it’s not a solo effort. More people should have editing access, and this is far simpler than sharing a Word file, converting it to PDF, and sending it every time there’s a change.

Should you have a single long page with a table of contents linked to headers within the text (anchors ), or multiple pages connected to a parent page? It’s really up to you. SPO Pages give you lots of freedom and are incredibly easy to use.

When would I still use a PDF? Well, for price quotes or documents that need a fixed format and go beyond the work environment, PDF might still be the best choice.

For more information on how to start, click here .