The H-Factor

Art had a pretty busy week with five posts in five days, so I thought I’d chime in to give him a bit of a break.

A question I often get asked, is from users who would like to share their HydraCALC and HydraLIST printouts with non-Hydratec users.

HydraVIEW offers the option to save the transmittal as an .HVUF file, which can then be emailed to another user and viewed in HydraVIEW.  This is similar to the .HLPF file which HydraLIST automatically creates after processing your stocklist.  Again, these files are fine if the person you’re emailing the file to has HydraVIEW.  But what happens if they don’t?

A simple solution is to install a PDF Writer application to your computer.  This acts as another printer on your computer, but instead of it being a piece of hardware, it’s a software application which creates a PDF file of your printout.  Instead of printing to your HP Printer, you select to print to the PDF writer, give the printout a filename, and voila, it’s created a PDF file to share.

Adobe Acrobat Elements is the gold standard of PDF creators, but you can find some inexpensive and shareware applications as well.  A quick Google search finds many to choose from.