eCTD Tips: Microsoft Office 2010 and PDF Creation Problems

In a previous post, I discussed a minor issue that we encountered when my company recently upgraded from Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2010. In this post, I’ll describe a more serious problem caused by the update and the (relatively) easy solution we finally discovered.
The Problem

Prior to the upgrade, we used the “Create a PDF” button on the Acrobat toolbar in Word to create PDFs for submissions. As you know, PDFs created using this button will include functional bookmarks based upon the heading styles used, a fully hyperlinked table of contents, and functional internal hyperlinks within the text of the document (if they were created by the author). Shortly after the upgrade from Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2010, we noticed that the “Create a PDF” button was no longer functional in any Office application – nothing happened at all when we clicked it.

While our IT staff contacted both Microsoft and Adobe regarding this issue, my team began investigating workarounds to minimize the impact this would have on our publishing work. Unfortunately, we were only able to come up with two, less-than-stellar options.


Potential Solution #1 – Print to PDF

We quickly discovered that we could still create PDFs by printing to the Adobe PDF printer, but this option is far from ideal for documents destined for an eCTD submission. PDFs created using the Print function do not include any automatically created bookmarks or hyperlinks. Using this option would require us to manually create bookmarks and hyperlinks in every document. While this could be acceptable in limited circumstances, it’s certainly not a practical solution for producing eCTD submissions on a daily basis.

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