MS Project 2010 to pdf

converting microsoft project plan 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.
Go to file save as to save ms project plan as pdf
Enter a File name: and select PDF Files (*.pdf) from the Save as type: drop down menu.
MS project 2010 to PDF using Save As

Click Save. Document Export Options dialog will pop up. You can choose to save the whole plan to PDF or only a date range.
The document export options dialog in ms project
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.
Save as PDF can create many pdf pages. You can reduce this by selecting a date range in the Document Export Options.
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.
ms project 2010 to pdf - using the print to pdf option
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.
Page set up  dialog box for printing ms project plans
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

Recommended reading on Microsoft Project

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

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