Screencast: How to Export SmartDraw Diagrams to Portable Document Format (PDF)

Published 2 July 8 2:0 AM | Aaron

In this screencast I will show you how to export any SmartDraw diagram to Portable Document Format, more commonly referred to as PDFs. PDFs are the best way to share SmartDraw documents with coworkers and associates who may not have SmartDraw installed, so watch this screencast if you're interested in learning how to export SmartDraw documents to PDF format (it's really easy.)

This SmartDraw screencast requires Adobe Flash Player 9.

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Comments

# reda seireg said on July 7, 2008 11:42 PM:

good

# Peter Hughes said on July 8, 2008 8:41 AM:

Thats a cool technique and the presentation was impressive. It was brief, clear and informative. Am I right in thinking that the document cannot be manipulated by the receiver of the pdf document?

# Brendan Bunting said on July 8, 2008 9:05 AM:

Very useful.

# Kim said on July 8, 2008 9:10 AM:

Very hard to hear the presentation with volume at 100%!

# Aaron said on July 8, 2008 10:30 AM:

Kim,

My apologies for that - I'll try sitting closer to the microphone next time, although when I played it back the audio seemed fine to me :(, sorry you had trouble hearing it!

Peter,

You can only edit the PDF if you have a copy of Adobe Acrobat or any other PDF writer, so yes, the receiver of the document generally cannot manipulate the PDF.

If you want to produce a password-protected PDF or something with a higher level of document-protection then I recommend exporting your SmartDraw diagrams as images (.JPEG, .PNG, .BMP, etc...) and embed those into a PDF document that you're creating using Acrobat or some other PDF writer.

If you want the people receiving your document to be able to manipulate your document then your best bet is to embed your SmartDraw diagrams into Microsoft Word. Tomorrow morning I'll be running a new screencast called "Using SmartDraw with PowerPoint and Word" which shows you how to include SmartDraw diagrams into both of those programs.

# MMM said on July 8, 2008 10:44 AM:

No presentation. Just a blank screen with a round circle in the middle, all of which flashed for awhile then stopped.

MMM

# MMM said on July 8, 2008 10:44 AM:

Now the whole thing is flashing again!

# Toni said on July 8, 2008 11:03 AM:

The cast did not play for me.

# Aaron said on July 8, 2008 11:17 AM:

MMM and Toni,

I went ahead and changed the embed code for the screencast. Apparently there was an issue with the HTML code for people using older versions of flash. I went ahead and modified the HTML so it should run properly now.

# Charlie said on July 8, 2008 11:19 AM:

Good presentation, brief and to the point.

# Scott said on July 8, 2008 1:24 PM:

did not play for me

# NikkiR804 said on July 8, 2008 8:16 PM:

Is it possible to make your flowchart into 2 pages of PDF? I tried exporting mine and since it was a  big and long diagram and I had a table underneath, there was a big white space in my PDF (on the sides).

# Fabrice Mazerolle said on July 8, 2008 10:39 PM:

This is not "Smartdraw for dummies" but "Smartdraw by a bunch of dummies"

There is a lot more to explain about smartdraw than to show how to export a smartdraw to pdf ! What about a screencast on how to move the mouse ?

How about really interesting screencasts about new and tricky stuff. Look at other tutorials on Excel, Photoshop and the like and you will discover that they go much deeper into the subject of their software than you do .

# Milton said on July 8, 2008 11:46 PM:

Good stuff....

# Aalaeldin Khirawi said on July 9, 2008 3:27 AM:

Did not Play for me

# James Walsh said on July 9, 2008 7:41 AM:

I have had no problems viewing all of your recent displays. All informative even if I do not require them.

James

# Toni said on July 9, 2008 8:05 AM:

Thanks for your effort but it still did not play.

# Aaron said on July 9, 2008 10:23 AM:

Fabrice,

We produced the screencast because it's something that our readers asked for, just like the PowerPoint/Excel screencast that was published today.

Don't all SmartDraw users click on those buttons already, you ask? We have found some users completely miss that PDF button at the top of the screen, so our goal was to provide a brief, albeit basic, screencast to provide a quick summary of the feature.  The screencasts we produce are designed to maximize their usefulness and they will not always cover the most technical of issues.

SmartDraw is not a tricky program - it's designed to be intuitive and automated. SmartDraw does address a wide breadth of needs and some of them are more complicated than others. I typically make screencasts of the issues that affect the most users.

If you have some specific suggestions for a screencast that you'd like to see, feel free to suggest something here in the comments or you can send us an email here:

workingsmarter AT smartdraw DOT com

As for everyone who is still having playback issues, it turns out that you need the latest version of Flash (version 9) to watch them. You can update your browser's version of flash here:

www.adobe.com/.../flashplayer

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