MS Project 2010 to pdf

MS Project 2010 is a professonal industry standard tool for Project Planning. Very often the team delivering a project will not have MS Project installed on their PCs and the best way to share a project plan is to make it into a PDF.

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.

Save as pdf in MS Project 2010

Go to the File menu and Click Save As.

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

Click Save. Document Export Options dialog will pop up. You can choose to save the whole plan to PDF or only a date range.

Select your choices under Include Non-Printing Information and select if you want the PDF to be ISO 19005-1 compliant (this is a format designed for long term preservation). Click OK.

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 MS Project

Download and install pdf creation software. Or use your existing PDF software e.g. Adobe

There are plenty of free programs available. In this example I have used PrimoPDF.

Open up MS Project 2010 (if Project was already open I suggest closing it and reopening).

Go to File and select Print.

In the Printer dropdown menu select the PDF creator that you downloaded.

In the screenshot the pdf printer is PrimoPDF.

Use the Settings to change the look of the PDF. There are more options here than using the Save As method and you can usually get the plan to fit on one page at least horizontally.

Click Page Setup for more advanced options.

Particularly useful is Scaling which allows scaling by a % or you can force the PDF to Fit to: x pages wide by x pages tall.

Read more guides on using Microsoft Project

• Microsoft Project Calendars - Non-working time - enter team vacation into MS 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 MS Project
• Highlighting tasks - This step by step guide shows how to Highlight tasks in MS Project.
• Hyperlinks - How to add hyperlinks in MS Project schedules
• Adding tasks from your project plan to Outlook - How to import Outlook tasks into MS 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.