All over the globe if you have had to send a client a report, legal document, or send them a rough mock up of something, chances are they were edited or created in Microsoft Word and most likely sent as a PDF file.

Microsoft Word Documents (Word) and Portable Document Format (PDF) have been the industry standard for creating and viewing reports. The flexibility of Word allows you to edit and customize just about anything you are working on and the PDF is universally the “final-form” document format, it’s basically electronic paper used globally by businesses and government organizations. Posting a pdf is essentially THE web version of a publication these days.

Microsoft Word:

• Since it’s birth in 1981 word remains the number one word processor in the world today.
• Easy to use document creation for reports, letters, brochures etc.
• Powerful editing tools such as spell check, layout and design options, referencing tools and tons of templates to start from.
• Availability – now available on almost any Operating System on the market.

PDF:

• Portability, which makes it virtually readable on all operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Unix and Android)
• Flexibility – unlike webpages which require various code such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript the PDF doesn’t require any knowledge about coding.
• Security – perfect for limited distribution documents it can also be password protected and is very hard to make a quick edit once sent to the user.

One of the main features in SnapInspect is the ability to send clients inspection reports from the app. This report can either be Word or PDF format. The word format is provided so that you can make changes back at the office or add some additional content you may have missed during the inspection. The PDF format is commonly used as the final report format to send clients. It cannot be changed once sent which is why it is recommended to send the PDF version to clients. So, now you know a little bit more about why we’ve integrated word and PDF formats into SnapInspect there’s only only one thing left to do… Get inspecting!