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API Spotlight: Convert Documents to PDF
3/1/2023 - Brian O'Neill


Creating PDFs is a repetitive office administration task - but it doesn’t have to slow you down. With our PDF document conversion APIs in your arsenal, you can quickly and securely convert common document types to and from PDF format – including Word DOCX, Excel XLSX, PowerPoint PPTX, and more. In this article, we’ll highlight a few of our most popular PDF Document Conversion APIs and discuss how they can impact your business.

PDF Printed Documents

Convert Between DOCX And PDF

There are few word processors more widely known and used than Microsoft Word, which means DOCX files are an exceedingly common sight on most work computers. As useful as Word may be for creating content, however, it’s not quite as ideal for sharing it, because there’s no guarantee that downstream document recipients will have Microsoft Word installed on their device.

Converting DOCX documents to PDF will ensure that the original document contents – including all rich formatted text, tables, and multimedia elements – can be viewed by anyone in a standard, interoperable format while simultaneously adding a layer of document security. Conversely, if those PDF files need to be opened and edited, converting back to DOCX will do the trick.

Our DOCX to PDF and PDF to DOCX conversion APIs make it easy and simple to convert between documents at scale, requiring each file path in the request and returning each output file encoding string when the operation completes.

Convert Between XLSX and PDF

For several decades now, Excel has dominated the market for spreadsheet applications. Presently, there are more than a billion unique Excel users worldwide - it’s no exaggeration to say that millions of professionals can’t go more than a week without opening an XLSX document for one reason or another.

When it comes to publishing or sharing finalized projects created in Excel (especially reports), however, XLSX isn’t the ideal format to use. Not only will PDF format provide a more clean, presentable format for viewing spreadsheet data, but it’ll also increase overall document security as well, ensuring unwanted external users can’t access and change important information on a whim.

Our XLSX to PDF and PDF to XLSX conversion APIs allow developers to automate the process of exporting key XLSX reports in PDF format and just as easily return PDF documents to XLSX format when the need arises.

Convert Between PPTX and PDF

While we might think of PowerPoint as a decades old slide-by-slide presentation design software, the modern, real-life uses of PPTX far exceed that parameter: PowerPoint is widely used for designing logos, video thumbnails, interactive documents, infographics and much more.

However, with the amount of complex information they store, these files can become very large, which makes sharing PPTX over email and messaging applications a bit of a hassle. PDF presents a lighter-weight format for sharing (especially when rasterized) and, similarly to the DOCX use case, it helps ensure the project’s interoperability with external operating systems.

Our PPTX to PDF and PDF to PPTX conversion APIs make it easy to convert PowerPoint documents to and from PDF format with a high degree of efficiency.

Convert Document to PDF

If you’re developing a workflow to convert multiple separate file extensions to PDF, automatic file detection may well be the solution you’re looking for. Rather than converting from an expected file extension such as DOCX, XLSX, or PPTX, an autodetection conversion API will first read the file extension for the input file and perform the correct PDF conversion based on that result.

Our Convert Document to PDF API is equipped to detect all major office document formats (including DOCX, DOC, XLSX, XLS, PPTX, PPT, HTML, TXT, and more than 100 common image formats such as JPG, PNG, TIFF, etc.) from the file included in your request and will return the PDF file encoding as a string.

For more information on our PDF Document Conversion APIs, please contact a member of our sales team.

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