If you must use a PDF, at least make it widescreen.

My first piece of advice, stop using PDFs to share your reports.

Now I know that 95% of you not follow that advice. Even if PDFs are shown to be unfit for human consumption, they are still the status quo reporting tool for most organizations. (For the very few of you who will consider that advice, check out this post I wrote about creating web reports.)

So, given that you are likely to continue using PDFs to share your work, let’s talk about how those PDFs should be formatted.

But first, is it actually a report, or report theater?

At lot of organizations stick with PDFs because you can make a PDF look really pretty. While web development has come a long way in the last decade, it’s still far easier to work within a set canvas (i.e. 8.5 x 11 inches).

But it’s also like that restaurant with the fantastic presentation but tasteless food. I went to a bakery like this, got some really beautiful looking french pastries to try out. Unfortunately the beautiful looking pastries tasted like stale bread.

Report theater is when an organization wants to deliver a report with a certain look. But whether that report is readable or useful in any way is irrelevant.

If that’s you, by all means, create in whatever format you want.

Create your PDF reports using a widescreen format.

But if you are trying to create human readable reports, and must stick with PDF, then you should be creating in widescreen.

Because if someone is reading your PDF report, the vast majority of the time, they will be reading that report using a laptop or desktop computer. Meaning, they will be reading your report with a widescreen.

And if you would like direction on how to create such a report, check out this blog post I wrote on Slidedocs.

Don’t agree? Present your argument in the comments.

I can think of one pretty solid argument against my advice. How about you?