Add In to Merge Individual Records in Word to PDF

[marka87uk]

Hi,

I have a procedure in place which works although it is very slow on the machines we use at work so I wonder if there's a better way - maybe with an Add In.

The desired result is to have each record from a Mail Merge as an individual PDF document with a predefined naming format (RTI_xxxxxx.pdf) where xxxxxx is an employee number merge field defined in Word with a bookmark.

At the moment I have a macro in Word which saves each record as an individual .doc file with the correct name format and it works great albeit it is slow (about 20 records per minute (I have 12,000 records)) and has crashed a number of times in between due to Word running out of memory! We then convert each .doc to a .pdf using a bespoke pdf printer - again this works but it is very slow as it opens up each .doc, prints to pdf, then closes Word, and repeats for each record.

Are you aware of an Add In or better solution to achieve this?

Thanks!

 

[shawnhet]

Just a suggestion but, you can try and save the mail merge as one file convert that file to .pdf and then use a .pdf splitter to separate it off into individual files. I've used the following before and it worked well for me (on a much smaller scale that you're looking at).

PDFill Free PDF Tools - CNET Download.com

In terms of getting the files named appropriately, you can try

Ant Renamer - CNET Download.com

I've never used this one but it does seem to have an option to insert a list to use to rename from.

You may be able to play around with these apps or something similar to get you where you want to be. Good luck!

Cheers,

 

[marka87uk]

Thanks! That's given me an idea to think about! I'll let you know how I get on!

 

[Macropod]

See: Individual merge letters
The addin provides the option to create PDF files.

 

[marka87uk]

Thanks, I have seen that solution but not tried it. Unfortunately it would still provide me with the problem of having 12,000 individual Word files to convert to PDF. It is doable but only runs about 500 records per hour!

Today I made some progress though in creating a single PDF to be split! -

1. Merging the Word document to one Word file (took an hour) and then printing the whole document to one PDF (took about 2 and a half hours).
2. Merging the Word document straight to the PDF printer (took about about 1 and a half hours).

Option 2 was quicker but for some reason the output was slightly different (bigger margins for some reason - I wonder if it's an issue with the PDF printer driver).

Either way the output was one PDF which we will then use some splitting software to split into individual documents. I have a macro in Excel which will rename the files correctly based on the mail-merged list and in tests it took no time at all!

Further testing is required but at least I've shortened the process from taking a few days to a couple of hours!

 

[Macropod]

Since the addin has the capacity to produce individual PDFs directly, the overall process should be much faster than what you're now using. Do bear in mind that any such process for merging & outputting files from 12,000 records will a fair while. Ultimately, patience will be the order of the day ...