PDF format is very useful for any documents that are going to be shared with others, whether by posting online, via email or printed as hard copies. Using PDF means that you can control not only the content but also the presentational formatting, and ensure that what you create will remain consistent for your audience. PDF was designed to be cross-platform and is accessible from a variety of machines and devices.
Recently, I was reminded of a simple approach to batch converting Microsoft Word documents to PDF that I’d thought I’d share. A couple of times per year, I receive a large number of course descriptions from faculty that need to be converted to PDF format to post online for students to consult during registration. Some of the descriptions arrive in PDF format, but the majority of them are in Microsoft Word format.
So, there are several options for converting them:
I could, of course, open each file into Microsoft Word and convert it to PDF, but with a large number of files, that takes a lot of time.
With Adobe Acrobat, Nitro PDF, or another PDF creation and editing tool, I could batch convert Word documents. Had I been at my home machine when I was taking care of this task, that’s what I probably would have done, but I don’t have such software on my campus office computer.
So here’s a quick and easy solution using Google Drive. (Obviously, the usual caveats apply: don’t use a cloud-based solution for sensitive documents, and adhere to your institution’s information policies as appropriate. (But really, why would you be receiving and batch converting sensitive documents from Word anyway?))
Download the files to your machine if you haven’t already
Go to your Google Drive upload settings and select “Convert uploaded files to Google Docs format”
Create a folder for the conversion project (not a necessary step, but it keeps things tidy in your Drive account and facilitates batching)
Navigate to the new folder and upload the files from your computer
After the upload complete indicator appears, refresh the folder view to see that it contains the folders.
Click the select all checkbox to select all the files (or choose specific ones)
Under the More dropdown, select Download and choose PDF as the format. The selected files will be converted and compressed to a zip file and downloaded to your machine (you may need to confirm the download in an operating system dialog).
Open the zip file and extract the converted PDFs.
With this method, fifty one-page documents can be converted in just a couple of minutes.
What batch conversion methods do you use, if any? Please share in the comments.