How to write a PDF report

You have certainly happened to receive a homework assignment, with the priority of writing a report that allowed you to complete it with a good grade. Or, at work you may have been commissioned to produce a PDF report on the progress of your business, including arguments, results and statistics of various kinds.

Whatever your case is, don’t worry – I’m here to tell you how to write a PDF report and submit it to your teacher, or employer or anyone else, so that they can read it clearly and understand its content from whatever device you use. You will see: it will be really very easy, also because I will explain all the details of the case to you step by step.

I want to clarify that some of the tools I will talk about are paid, but do not worry: I will also offer you completely free solutions for writing your reports and the consequent export to PDF. So we just have to get into the action: I wish you a good read and I wish you a big good luck for everything!

Index

• Preliminary information
• How to write a report
  • Destination
  • Language
  • Information gathering
  • Writing a draft and reviewing
  • Insert list of sources
  • Write the summary
• How to export the report to PDF

Preliminary information

First of all, I think it’s good to explain what a relationship is . You have surely heard about it during your school or work activities, or even simply on the Internet or on TV.

A report is a written document – to be distributed in digital or paper format – which can be completely textual, i.e. include only typed characters, or enriched with graphic elements such as diagrams, tables, images and more.

A report can have several uses: summarize a text at school, propose a report of an activity at work or illustrate the results of a statistical research. The length of a report varies according to the needs of the writer. Usually, it is produced through a specific program for writing: think of the most classic example, Microsoft Word, which I will also use below as a reference point.

I remind you that Word is available for both Windows and macOS and is paid: it is distributed both as part of a monthly subscription (the one to Microsoft 365, starting from 7 euros/month) and together with the classic Office package with a one-time purchase. The subscription version includes a free 30-day trial with no renewal obligation: more info here.

If you have a tablet, perhaps one with a keyboard, you can also use Word on the go, through the application available for both Android and iOS / iPadOS. This is free for all devices with dimensions equal to or smaller than 10.1 “, otherwise it requires the subscription of a Microsoft 365 subscription.

That said, the directions I’ll give you for Word are actually applicable to most alternative word processing software as well, including some great ones available for free. An example above all? LibreOffice Writer, which I will also talk about later and which I have covered in great detail in a dedicated tutorial. In the Mac environment, then, it is possible to do excellent things with Pages.

Regardless of the word processing software used, to make a relationship compatible with the largest number of media and devices, it is good practice to convert it to PDF, a standard now supported by the vast majority of devices and operating systems that allows you to have a document read while always keeping it correct formatting (which in some cases does not happen with Word files if, for example, you open the document with a software version other than the one that generated the file or directly with a different program).

Also in this case, the solutions available are simple, numerous and often also included in word processing software (or operating systems). You will find more details on the whole procedure later in this tutorial.

How to write a report

Well, now that you have the theoretical foundations on how to write a PDF report, let’s move on to the practical side. In this chapter of my tutorial I want to show you some of the aspects that you cannot overlook in writing a report: only by taking into account each of them will you be able to arrive at a clean, effective and complete drafting.

Destination

Before starting to write your report, you must precisely outline what is the destination of your paper, that is, in essence, who will read the document produced by you and what is the purpose of the document itself. Secure this detail will help you throughout the rest of the procedure is not by chance, you will need to modulate the language and tone to fit your target, proposing certain types of information more or less complex and so on.

I would like to suggest some details in particular that you may consider. To create a relationship that is as formal as possible, prefer the use of the Times New Roman font, which is perhaps the “quintessential” font when it comes to formality. To be able to select it, go with the cursor at the top left of the document editing screen: just below the Design item, you will see a text box with the name of the character style, which is usually set by default to Calibri (Body). Click on this and the drop-down menu will open where you can select “Times New Roman” as the font.

As for the use of a formal or informal style, in case you need some advice in this regard, I invite you to consult my tutorials on how to write a letter to the computer, how to write a formal email and how to write an email to a professor. Clearly, there are differences between email and relationship, but some “rules” to follow apply to both one thing and another.

Language

As just mentioned, the language used is a fundamental detail to be taken into account when writing your report and it unfolds under many aspects. In addition to the aforementioned tones – more or less formal – much attention must be paid to correctness in writing, both grammatical and syntactic.

It is very important to re-read the report several times and eliminate any types or fix any phrases that sound bad. A little example tip: pay attention to accented capital E (you must use the character È and not the “E” without an accent followed by an apostrophe). More info here.

In Microsoft Word, however, there is a tool that can automatically detect grammatical errors. When opening a document, look at the small book-shaped button with a cross on it at the bottom left: clicking on it opens the side editor on the right, with a section that has the errors underlined and, more a low, a Suggestions section where you will find the program’s correction proposals.

Also beware of any foreign or slang terms that Word might mark as errors or distort, but that you actually spelled correctly.

Furthermore, since the report is a document that contains facts and not opinions, it is always good to be precise and illustrate in great detail any information included in your work. This, however, does not have to mean becoming verbose: being precise but concise, without boring the reader.

Information gathering

In order to write your report, you will certainly need to gather information about the topic you are dealing with. This information can come from different sources: first of all – maybe I will surprise you – but I advise you not to rely on the Web, or rather, calmly rely on the Internet, but to access books, written by certified bodies and authorities and so on, because Unfortunately, the Internet is full of pitfalls when it comes to bogus (or just plain inaccurate) information.

One of the most classic sources used on the Net, and which I also advise you to take into consideration, is Wikipedia; however, do it with a grain of salt, knowing that even in the famous online encyclopedia you can find information that is not completely reliable.

If you use Word on a PC, there is also a plugin within the program that allows you to consult the items of your interest on Wikipedia. To access it, go to the top with the mouse pointer and click on the Insert option, then press on the Wikipedia entry in the center of the toolbar just below. The side menu on the right will open, allowing you to search for any item via the search bar at the top and explore its various sections.

Writing a draft and reviewing

After outlining the target, the language and the information to be entered, it’s time to move on to the actual writing. The first step obviously consists in the drafting of a draft, i.e. a non-definitive version, which you will have to review in order to identify any necessary adjustments: errors, contents to be replaced, spacing and more.

To set up your draft, I advise you to start from a diagram consisting of the title of the report, introduction (to illustrate what will then be dealt with in detail within the document), the actual content of the report (with results, data, etc. ) and conclusions.

After having written, checked and corrected the draft, you must obviously save it (but in reality you must do it even before, in order to prevent some unexpected event from making you lose the work done): to proceed in this direction, click on the top left, on the button in the shape of a floppy disk, and choose the name and destination folder of the file.

Insert list of sources

The writing of the “body” of your relationship cannot lack the inclusion of the list of sources from which you have taken inspiration. You can insert this list at the end of the document, with a dedicated title and listing the sources through a bulleted list.

To indicate each source, you can choose the style you prefer: in any case, the author, title of the document/website/publication and date of publication must not be missing. You can also consider inserting external links to sources: to do this, simply copy and paste the link into the document and Word will immediately recognize it as an external link (I do not recommend putting a hyperlink on a text, otherwise the link will be illegible on the printed version of the report).

Write the summary

Another element that cannot be missing in any self-respecting report is the summary. It consists of a list of all chapters and paragraphs of the report, accompanied by the number of the page on which they are located. The summary is usually inserted at the beginning of the report, even before chapter 1.

Writing the summary, as you can see in the image above, can be done simply using the tools already made available by Microsoft Word, as well as manually. In this regard, I leave you to my tutorial dedicated to creating a table of contents in Word, if you want to better understand how to do it.

How to export the report to PDF

At this point in the tutorial, you have learned all the main aspects to consider when writing your report! Now, however, comes the crux of it all: exporting to PDF your report, in order to make it compatible with almost all the devices on which it will be read.

In case you don’t know, PDF stands for Portable Document Format and represents a document reading standard regardless of the medium in which it is opened. Converting a text file to PDF is very simple, but below I will show you the procedure in the specific case of this guide.

If you have used Microsoft Word, follow the steps I am going to show you to be able to export the report to PDF. First of all, open your report in Word, go to the File menu (top left) and choose the Save As option. At this point, you can find the text field at the top to complete with the title you want to give to the report.

Just below it, there is a bar that you can click to open the different format options in which you want to save the document. It is usually preset to “Word Document”: click on this bar and choose the PDF item from the list that appears.

Now, choose the folder where you want to save the report. Back, then, with the cursor on the PDF format selection bar, click on the Save button and that’s it.

As mentioned in the opening bars of the guide, Word is not the only solution to draft and then export a report to PDF. The best alternative that I suggest you to consider is LibreOffice, a completely free, multi-platform and Italian open-source suite compatible with all major operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and even Android, with a rather successful port) and with all Microsoft Office files.

If you don’t know how to install the program, I refer you to my tutorial on the subject. To export to PDF from LibreOffice, the procedure to follow is very similar to the one seen above for Word: open the report in Writer (the word processing software included in the suite), go to the File menu > Export as> Export to PDF format (top left), configure, if desired, the parameters of the file to be obtained, and press the Export and Save buttons to complete the operation.

Well, now you have also discovered the best alternative to Word: through LibreOffice, from your PC, you can export a report in PDF with the same effectiveness! However, there are many other solutions for writing PDF reports. One of them is to save the document in .docx format, so without converting it to PDF and take advantage of external solutions, such as the ones I told you about in my tutorial on how to convert Word documents to PDF.