How do you send something in PDF form?

Almost everything that can be opened can be saved as a PDF, and the click path is short in every case. Word hides it in the file type dropdown under Save As rather than giving it its own button, which is why people assume they need a converter website. Google Docs puts it under File then Download, with a Print-to-PDF fallback that Google recommends for very large documents in Chrome. The Mac route is the most useful one to remember, because the Print dialog's PDF button works in any app at all, so a web page, an email or a receipt becomes a PDF without you installing anything.

Paper is the one exception, and your phone handles it. Scan the page with a document scanner app rather than photographing it, because a photo arrives as a crooked image while a scan arrives as a readable PDF.

The reason someone says "send it in PDF form" is almost always layout. They have opened a .docx that reflowed on their machine, or a spreadsheet that printed across nine pages, and they want the thing to look on their screen exactly as it looked on yours. PDF fixes that.

What it does not do is protect anything. I sent a lot of proposals and reports in growth roles before this, and I watched plenty of people, me included, treat "I converted it to PDF" as though it were a security step. It isn't. A PDF forwards just as easily as a Word file, and once it is sitting in someone's downloads folder you have no idea where it goes next.

Attaching is right when the document is small, finished, and not sensitive. Beyond that, a link is the better instrument, because you can update the file after sending and you are not gambling on the recipient's mail server size limit.

That link can be Google Drive or Dropbox, and for a lot of documents that is the correct answer, so start there. If you want the mechanics of turning the file into a shareable URL, share a PDF as a link covers it. Where I would reach for something else is when the document needs explaining. Sending a proposal in PDF form and hoping the reader lands on the right two pages is optimism, not a plan. That gap is why we built LiveDocument, which puts a recorded video walkthrough alongside the PDF behind one link, with clickable highlights that jump the video to the section being discussed and page-level analytics showing what was actually read. It takes PDFs and images only, it is not an editor or a converter, so the export step above still happens in Word or Docs first, and it has link expiry and revocation rather than watermarking or NDA gating. If you need those, DocSend is the honest pointer.