Posting PDF files to a SharePoint 2013 blog

This problem has been around forever. I remember dealing with this back in the 2003 days. You try to copy and paste from a PDF file into a SharePoint blog and all the graphics and formatting go away. Below is a somewhat painful solution but it’s a pretty good solution none the less. Enjoy!

Step 1 – Convert your PDF to Microsoft Word format

Office cannot publish a PDF file directly to a SharePoint blog. If you try to copy and paste the information from the PDF file, it will not retain the formatting or the images. The easiest way to accomplish this is to convert the PDF file into a Word document using an online conversion service.

There are a large number of sites that will take care of the conversion and, if security is a concern, you can download a free application to do the conversion. The easiest thing to do is just Google “pdf to word online”. Most likely it will name the document with the .rtf extension. That’s OK. It will open in Word just fine.

Step 2 – Open the converted document in Word

Open the converted document in Word. Note that it will open Read Only. Click the Enable Editing button to change the mode to read/write.

Step 3 – Create a blog post

Click the File tab in Word and select New. From the template selection screen pick Blog Post. The first time you create a blog post, you will be required to register a blog. Simply enter the URL to the SharePoint blog and click next. You can actually have multiple accounts for blogging. Simply click the Manage Accounts button in the tool ribbon in Word.

At this point you will have 2 Word documents open: the converted PDF file and the blank blog post.

Step 4 – Copy the PDF data to the blog post

Go to the window that has the open, converted PDF document. Press Ctrl-A on the keyboard to select the entire document. Then press Ctrl-C on the keyboard to copy the data to the clipboard.

Select the window with the open, blank blog post, add a title and paste the information as desired.

Step 5 – Publish the blog post

Click the Publish button on the Word tool ribbon to publish the blog post to SharePoint. You can publish the blog post as a draft as well.

There you have it! All the steps required to post a PDF doc into a SharePoint blog post. Is it perfect? Nope. Sometimes the formatting gets hosed but it’s better than nothing.

Peace!