How to create a password free version of password protected PDF files for quick future reference?

We often receive various documents as password protected PDF files. These are essentially documents such as bank statement, credit card statement, and other important documents which may be contractual in nature, normally sent to you as an attachment to email, by your bank, your chartered accountant or your corporate clients.

Why are the PDF files password protected?

It is a good practice to password protect PDF files transmitted via email, as a safety measure, just in case your email lands up in the hands of an unauthorized person or is copied, while in transit, by a hacker.

However, once the PDF document has arrived in your Inbox and you have downloaded in in your own PC, it becomes quite inconvenient to open the PDF file as every time you need to open it, you need to provide the password. Especially, accounting statements may frequently be referred and many a times at a much later date in future. Remembering the variety of password formats used by the senders may be tedious. Wouldn't it be nice if you were able to save a copy of such PDF documents in a manner so that they can simply be opened by a double-click without providing the password?

The method to do this is very easy. If your PC runs Microsoft Windows (most PCs do), here are the steps:

STEP 1:

Open the PDF document first using Adobe Acrobat Reader by providing the password.

STEP 2:

Next click at the PRINT icon on the top toolbar or press CTRL-P.

Instead of selecting the default printer, select Microsoft XPS Writer and fire PRINT.

The XPS document Writer and Viewer are available by default on all Windows PCs.

STEP 3:

When you start the print, you will be prompted to save the file. Simply save the file in your desired folder, as an XPS file with a .xps extension. Depending upon the size of your PDF document, it may take a while for the XPS writer to convert the PDF into an XPS file.

Now, you have a password free version of your document which you can access simply by a double-click and it will open conveniently in the XPS document viewer.

STEP 4:

However, if you wish the store the password free version also as a PDF document, install PrimoPDF on your PC. PrimoPDF is a free software and can be safely installed by downloading it from www.primopdf.com.

After you have installed PrimoPDF in your PC, it will show up as yet another printer option in your list of printers. So, when you proceed to print any document, you will have the option to select PrimoPDF as the destination device.

Print the opened XPS document and select PrimoPDF as the destination printer.

PrimoPDF will ask you to provide the destination file path where you wish to store the generated PDF and then when you fire it with the Create PDF button, it will generate a PDF version of the document.

Your password free PDF document is now ready. Note that the only problem is that the PDF so created essentially stores your entire document as an image, which renders the document unsearchable using the windows search tools. Hence, I recommend storing the XPS version of the document.

Hope this helps!!