Turn your résumés to PDF

My two former classmates, saiehun & fzk, came to me with a request. They wanted me to help them turn their résumés into PDF. That's a brilliant idea. Turning your résumé into PDF makes it tamper-proof, so no one will be able to 'accidentally' alter or delete any information on it when you submit it along with your job application. Plus, PDF is one of the best file format for printing.

The question now is how to do it? From my experience, there are a few ways that you can try.

The most obvious solution is to use Adobe Acrobat, the program designed for creating PDF documents. Not to be confused with Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can only be used to read PDF documents and costs nothing. Adobe Acrobat is expensive, costing around a thousand ringgit or so.

I'm here to suggest to you a few cost-free solutions to PDF creations. They're quite easy to follow, nothing too technical. You'll be turning documents (not just your résumé) into PDF in no time.

Solution #1: OpenOffice

OpenOffice comes with a feature for turning (or as they call it, exporting) documents into PDF. It also can read files in Microsoft Office formats. So if you wrote your résumé in Word, you can still open it in OpenOffice Writer without much problem. And turning it into PDF is as simple as clicking a button on the OpenOffice toolbar.

Solution #2: PDFCreator

For people like me who can't afford Adobe Acrobat, there's PDFCreator. This program acts as a virtual printer, where it prints your documents to PDF instead of through the printer. It works with a large number of programs and virtually any file format you can print using the printer. PDFCreator also comes with a lot of features, including security.

Solution #3: PDFOnline

If you have an Internet connection, why not try PDFOnline? Simply upload your résumé. in .doc (Word's native file format) and let PDFOnline to the rest. There is however a 2MB file size limit.


Remember, these methods are for turning any .doc documents into PDF, not necessarily just for résumés.

I've heard that the online word processor, Zoho Writer can save documents in PDF as well. If you've tried it please share your knowledge since I haven't tried Zoho Writer myself.

I hope (at least one of) these methods will work for you. If you got suggestions or questions, leave a comment or send an email. If you happened to be job hunting right now, all the best! And to all Muslims readers, Ramadhan Karim!