Creating PDF bid letters and reports

Post by **John Whitling** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 9:55 am

You have a few options for emailing bid proposals ..
1. You can copy the entire white area of the bid letter (after you've set it up and entered a contact to send it to) and then in MS Word (or similar program) you can open a new document, and then go to Edit and choose "Paste Special" and then select the "unformatted text" option. Your new Word Doc should look just like the bid letter at that point.

2. You can get a PDF printer utility like PDF Creator (free download here http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator). Install it on your machine and then set it to the default printer in Windows. Then when you print the bid letter in Gen 2 you'll be prompted to save the bid letter as a file name on your computer which you can then attach to an email. While PDF Creator will allow you to print all bid letters at once, other PDF utilities may not. If so you will probably have to print one letter at a time this way. To do that go to the bidders list, put your cursor on the contact to print, and then click the "print one letter" to print that client's letter.

I prefer the PDF file route myself as I can then send nice documents that are not easily editable to clients, and keep an exact copy of the document on my computer. Does that help?

Hank H · Post by **Hank H** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 8:09 pm

Has anyone been having trouble with part of the bid letter being cutoff when printing to PDF? I am using Acrobat Professional 8.
The print preview looks great but once I open the saved PDF file the bottom 3.25" is blank on every page. As long as the bid list is short and my closing is above that dimension I can use the PDF printer.
Thanks for the tip on how to import the info to Word. Items get a little out of alignment when doing this but they can be adjusted easily enough. Printing to PDF is definitely the way I would like to go if I can get it to work right.

Post by **John Whitling** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 10:59 pm

Yes, for some reason Acrobat Pro does that. It's not too good at printing spreadsheets I guess. Having said that, using PDFCreator is free and it works quite nicely, especially if you are printing many letters at once. See the post above for a link to download PDFCreator.

Hank H · Post by **Hank H** » Thu Jan 15, 2009 11:25 am

I was afraid you were going to say that. I will have to give the PDFCreator a try. Another program to install....

I did find that you could copy the white area of the bid letter and "Paste Special" to the A1 cell in Excel 2003 as a "Corel Quattro Pro 8 Notebook Object". I then right click on the object and go to Format Object > Colors and Lines > Line; Color = No Line (to get rid of the border line - if desired).
After clicking on "Print Preview" I adjust the margins if necessary and then print to PDF. Seems to work pretty good.

Thanks for your help, Hank

Post by **John Whitling** » Thu Jan 15, 2009 11:30 am

Similarly, you can also paste special/unformated text into MS Word or other document programs and not have to mess with cells/lines, etc. It goes in quite nicely.

As for Acrobat, the problem is in their program, which is kind of funny, considering that they created PDFs, and make quite a living off of it.

PDFCreator just installs as a print driver so it's not hard to use at all.

Hank H · Post by **Hank H** » Sat Jan 17, 2009 5:30 pm

I just got through installing PDFCreator and it has the same problem; the bottom 3" of the bid letter is getting cut off.
I tried printing from Word and Excel to the PDFCreator and they come out fine.
Any other thoughts on this problem?

Post by **John Whitling** » Sun Jan 18, 2009 2:45 pm

Hank
Did you use the posted link or did you go to PDFCreator.com? I ask because they are not related at all. If you didn't use the posted link, above please try that. It's free too.

Hank H · Post by **Hank H** » Tue Jan 20, 2009 10:05 am

John,
With high hopes I uninstalled the PDFCreator that I downloaded from their website (pdfcreator.com) and installed the one from your link - PDFForge.org.
It worked great!!
Thanks again for your help, Hank

Post by **John Whitling** » Tue Jan 20, 2009 10:39 am

Glad to hear you got the problem figured out! That PDFCreator website is a real fooler. There are so many software companies trying to get in on charging for PDF software, and ironically the best PDF software I've found has been that free open source one.

User Support Forums

Creating PDF bid letters and reports

Creating PDF bid letters and reports

Lower portion of bid letter cut off in PDF

Printing bid letter to PDF

Printing bid letter to PDF

Printing bid letter to PDF