Batch convert Word documents to PDFs

Only downside is that you have to click Ok once for each file.

answered Aug 3, 2009 at 17:35 2,165 2 2 gold badges 26 26 silver badges 24 24 bronze badges

This was what I actually did. I had to do it a little differently though. I openend the CutePDF "Printer" from the control panel, so it showed what would be the printer-queue. Then I dragged and dropped the documents into that window - and then it was all pounding on ENTER to accept the filename from there. They were all named MICROSOFT WORD - [filename].pdf, but I can solve that easily.

Commented Aug 4, 2009 at 0:26

The same workflow can be used with PDFCreator (en.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator). If you install it as a service or in automatic mode it is hands off except for select > print.

Commented Jul 13, 2010 at 21:01

If I highlight more than 15 files in Windows the 'Print' option disappears from the right-click context menu. I've just tried the drag n drop method, but 94 files might just be too much for it.

Commented Feb 23, 2012 at 13:43

This might be pushing it into stackoverflow.com territory, but you could script Word 2007 to open and save a document as PDF. This requires Office 2007 and the "Save as PDF" plug-in from Microsoft.

Save this to a file SaveAsPDF.js and run it from the command line using cscript.exe //nologo SaveAsPDF.js SomeFolder\MyDocToConvert.doc :

var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject"); var docPath = WScript.Arguments(0); docPath = fso.GetAbsolutePathName(docPath); var pdfPath = docPath.replace(/\.doc[^.]*$/, ".pdf"); var objWord = null; try < WScript.Echo("Saving '" + docPath + "' as '" + pdfPath + "'. "); objWord = new ActiveXObject("Word.Application"); objWord.Visible = false; var objDoc = objWord.Documents.Open(docPath); var wdFormatPdf = 17; objDoc.SaveAs(pdfPath, wdFormatPdf); objDoc.Close(); WScript.Echo("Done."); >finally < if (objWord != null) < objWord.Quit(); >> 
answered Aug 23, 2009 at 17:35 2,202 1 1 gold badge 15 15 silver badges 14 14 bronze badges

The above code works excellently but it only takes one file as an argument. I was too lazy to look up a way to filter a directory in JScript, so I cooked up a way in Powershell using below post as inspiration: stackoverflow.com/questions/181036/… PS E:\MyDocuments> ls *.doc | %

Commented Sep 4, 2012 at 8:12 @bobbymcr Link in answer is dead. See here for current SaveAsPDF plugin download. Commented Aug 3, 2018 at 17:08

Does anyone have an idea how to make this work using angular/typescript? I've had limited sources and struggled to find solutions.

Commented May 5, 2021 at 9:18

well, cutepdf & pdf99 do their job well, but i find PDFcreator more appealing as it 'print's in higher quality than the other two, it also has more configuration option, plus it's open-source.

answered Sep 18, 2009 at 14:41 488 2 2 silver badges 6 6 bronze badges

PDFCreator can be used as answered by kjensen above, however, I wanted to point out that in the PDFCreator options, you can enable auto-save, which will automatically save each document in the directory of your choosing with the filename of your choice as well. That way you don't need to hit "enter" to verify that you want to save each file.

Commented Sep 15, 2010 at 13:20

If you have a huge bundle of Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint Presentations on your hard drive that you would like to convert into PDF at once without investing in commercial software like Adobe Acrobat, try Google Docs.

While it has always been possible to convert Office documents into PDF using Google Docs, the new export feature makes it even easier for you to batch convert Microsoft Office and OpenOffice file formats into PDF (or HTML) in three easy steps. Batch Conversion to PDF with Google Docs

Use Google Docs as a Batch PDF Converter

Step #1 - Create a new "input" folder in Google Docs where you'll upload all your documents and presentations that are to converted into PDF.

Step #2 - Now select the Upload Document option in Google Docs, set the destination folder to the one that you created in Step #1 and upload* all your documents.

Google Docs officially supports the following file formats though you may also upload images:

* Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps). * Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), OpenDocument (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw). * Microsoft Excel (csv, .xls, .xlsx) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods). 

[*] You may also use the email option to upload documents onto Google Docs but that would put everything on the main folder and managing documents can therefore become a issue especially when you have too many files.

Step #3 - Once all files are uploaded onto Google Docs, open the dashboard again and select the "input" folder from the right sidebar. Select all the files in this folder and choose "Export" under "More Options".

Here's select "PDF" (or HTML) as the output format and all your Word Documents, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. will be instantly converted into PDF.

And if you are converting a large batch of documents into PDF, you don't have to wait in the browser for the conversion to finish as Google Docs will automatically send you an email once the processing is over. The email will have a link from where you can directly download all the PDF files in one large ZIP.