Exporting Documents as PDF on iPad: A Step-by-Step Guide

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In this video, we’re going to look at how you can export a document as a PDF on the iPad. We do this basically by printing it, but instead of printing it to a printer, when we go to the Print dialog box, we can save it as a file. Let’s see what I mean. Let’s go over to my iPad. Let’s first take a look at this in Safari, I’m going to open up Safari here, I have this web page, what I would like to do is save this as a PDF. Well, if you’re familiar with the iPad, the way that we save files is we go to our share icon, basically, we’re going to share this. And a lot of cases, what you do is you share with the files app. So I click on this, and you’re gonna see I do not have the option to share it with the files app, I swipe up, there’s no way that I can save this to the files app, I can’t save this web page as a PDF through the share icon. Also, when you do save it to the files app, it does not always work out the way that you want it to. You’ll see that shortly. So how can I save this as a PDF? Well, basically, what we need to do is we need to go to print. For those of you that are familiar with the Mac, this has been available on the Mac since Mac OS 10 came out, what we can do is we can save anything that we can print as a PDF, well, we can do the same thing on the iPad. So I can print this document. So now I click on Print. But instead of going through and printing it, what I do is I go up to the share icon here again.

And then you’re going to see save two files. When I selected this. What I can do is save it, I’m going to save this over to my desktop, I click on Save. And now when we go over to files here, and we go over to my desktop, you’re going to see that I have a PDF of that page. So by printing it and then saving it as saves it as a PDF. Let’s take a look at this in mail. I go over to mail here. I want to save this email as a PDF. So how would I do that? Well, I need to print it with the Mail app to print it, what we do is we go to the arrow here in the lower right hand corner. And then what we need to do is swipe up and you’re going to see print. When I click on Print,

I go to the share icon. I click on save to files. And now it’s going to save that email message as a PDF. Let’s go over to my notes app. I’m going to click on notes here. What I would like to do is save this recipe here as a PDF. Well, if we look under our share icon, we do have save to files. But watch what happens when I do this. It is not going to save it as a PDF. I’m just going to leave it as text, Max. Let’s just go ahead and rename it here. This is recipe right?

So I click on save, you’d think it would save it as a PDF. But when I click on it, and we go to our files app, what you’re going to see is that it is a text file, so it does not save it as a PDF. So how can I do that from the Notes app? Well, just like with Safari and mail and any other app that you can print from, what you need to do is print this so I go up to the share icon, we go to print and then we go to share again. Save to files. I’m gonna leave it as instant cocoa here, click on Save.

And now, when we go over to files here, you’re gonna see that I have my instant cocoa recipe, and it is a PDF. So when you use Save to files, it does not always save it as a PDF. If you need to make sure that it is always a PDF. What you need to do is figure out how to print from that app. And then once you print it instead of clicking on print, click on the Share icon again and then you’re able to save it as a PDF. So that is how we save our documents as a PDF on the iPad.