Mac Preview Annotation Primer Tutorial
The Mac OS X application called Preview is a very useful tool and its name explains it quite well in that:
- it creates output like you’d see in a Print Preview scenario, before you okay it for hardcopy printing
- it accepts many data formats as input, like shown today with the spreadsheet (taken from previous Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Primer Tutorial), it is capable of opening, and represents this in a report style (ie. the spreadsheet read today can not be amended in each cell once you are in Preview)
- it allows the user to add annotations to its PDF output, as we do, here, with our tutorial
- it creates PDF and so is creating:
- web ready data
- hardcopy friendly output
- data with fidelity (should this be a requirement … have a read of Document Fidelity Primer Tutorial)
As you can see, Preview’s annotation feature can make it very useful as a way to explain an issue in a web (via PDF) or hardcopy presentation as a simpler alternative to a Powerpoint presentation perhaps.
So, today, here is a tutorial that shows you some importing of spreadsheet data into Preview, the addition of some annotation, the saving to PDF, the emailing of that PDF, and the uploading of the resultant email attachment to Google Drive (where a cycle of Google Drive/email attachment editing can mean this document never has to land back at your laptop desktop/disk from then on, should you want to work that way).
Link to the output PDF of this tutorial … Microsoft_Excel_Spreadsheet_Primer_Tutorial.pdf.
Link to Preview information … from Apple.
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