Our clients often have documents such as ethical approvals, questionnaires, and participant information sheets (to name just a few) for their research, which need to be incorporated into their theses. These documents are usually in portable document format (PDF), which can be slightly challenging to incorporate into a thesis written in Microsoft Word.

There are several methods for inserting PDFs into a Microsoft Word document, and you’ll find that each method will result in different levels of quality.

Some methods I’ve known clients to use are:

1. The Snipping tool on Windows (Windows logo key + Shift + S) or Snip on a Mac (⌘ + Shift + 4)
2. Inserting as an object in Microsoft Word (Insert > Object > Create from file)
3. Using an online PDF converter to convert to an image (such as https://pdf2png.com)
4. Exporting from Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Illustrator to an image

To illustrate the differences in output between each method, I created a fictitious ethics application and went through each method above. The results can be seen below:

Figure 1. Snipping tool on Windows (saved in PNG format)

Figure 2. Inserted as an object in Microsoft Word

Figure 3. Using an online tool (saved in PNG format)

Figure 4. Exported from Adobe Acrobat (saved as 300DPI PNG)

Figure 5. Exported from Adobe Illustrator (saved as 300DPI PNG)

From looking at the images (especially if you zoom in), using the Snipping tool and inserting it as an object in Microsoft Word resulted in reasonably poor-quality and blurry images. The results from using the online conversion tool, Adobe Acrobat, and Illustrator resulted in much clearer. Our personal preference is to use Adobe Illustrator for converting PDFs to image files when we are formatting theses.

Just a quick note – this illustration is not 100% scientifically correct (but is valid enough for the purposes of this blog post).

Finally, most clients we work with wait until the very end of the process to get their appendices ready to insert. While you may not necessarily know which order they will appear in the thesis (as they will be presented in the order they are mentioned in the text), you can still prepare them well in advance and sort out any quality issues well before you submit.