Microsoft Project is a professonal industry standard tool for project planning. Very often the team delivering a project won't have Microsoft Project installed on their computer and the best way to share a project plan is to make it into a PDF (Portable Document Format).

Project Planners may also want to share PDFs rather than the master .mpp file (the standard file extension for a project plan) to ensure that their plan can't be changed.

Video - Print or Save Microsoft Project Schedules to PDF

Here is a video demonstrating how to save or print a Microsoft Project file as a PDF: Watch on YouTube

How to Save a Microsoft Project as PDF - version 2010 to latest

Here are the steps to save a Microsoft Project Plan as a PDF file:

1. Open your project plan in Microsoft Project.
2. Go to the File menu and Click "Save As".

3. Enter a File name: and select "PDF Files (*.pdf)"" from the "Save as type" drop down menu.



4. Click Save. The Document Export Options dialog box will appear.
5. Select your options:
   • Choose to save the entire plan or only a date range to PDF
   • Select options under "Include Non-Printing Information"
   • Choose if you want the PDF to be ISO 19005-1 compliant (long term preservation format)

6. Click OK to save the PDF.

You may find that not all of the plan fits within the page width particularly if you have a lot of tasks. If selecting a date range doesn't work try Print to pdf instead.

Print to pdf in Microsoft Project

Here are the steps to print a Microsoft Project plan to a PDF file:

1. If you are using an old version of Windows or Mac OS you may need to download and install pdf creation software. There are plenty of free programs available such as PrimoPDF. In more recent version PDF creation is built-in.
2. Open your Microsoft Project plan.
3. Go to File and select Print.
4. In the Printer dropdown menu select the PDF creator that you downloaded or just select "Print to PDF".

5. Adjust settings like page scaling and orientation in the print dialog to optimize the formatting of the PDF. Click "Page Setup" for more advanced options.

6. Click Print. The PDF file will be created.

The print to PDF method provides more options to customize the layout and fit your project plan nicely onto the PDF pages. This can produce better looking PDFs than the Save As approach.

Read more guides on using Microsoft Project

• Microsoft Project Calendars - Non-working time - enter team vacation into Microsoft Project calendars
• Schedule Constraints part 1 - How to use Microsoft Project constraints
• Constraints part 2 - Common mistakes in using scheduling constraints
• Create constraints - How to create project schedule constraints
• Viewing the Critical Path - video tutorial
• Using Filters - How to filter your project plan by certain tasks or resources
• Custom Filters - How to create a custom filter in Microsoft Project
• Highlighting tasks - This step by step guide shows how to Highlight tasks in Microsoft Project.
• Hyperlinks - How to add hyperlinks in Microsoft Project schedules
• Adding tasks from your project plan to Outlook - How to import Outlook tasks into Microsoft Project
• Detailed guide to using the Microsoft Project Timeline

Recommended reading on Microsoft Project

Marmel, E. (2010). Project 2010 Bible, John Wiley & Sons

Daley, S. (2013). Project 2013 In Depth, Que.