I am looking for a program that can batch convert Microsoft Word documents to PDF (specifically, 1 PDF file for each Microsoft Word document). It should be able to scale to a large quantity of Microsoft Word documents (~100k).

Any license, operating system and price is fine. It could be CLI or GUI. The more versions of Microsoft Word it supports, the better.

I am aware of:

  • Is it assumed that the machine that has the task of performing the conversion has a recent MS Office installed? – Steve Barnes May 4 '18 at 4:43
  • @SteveBarnes yes – Franck Dernoncourt May 4 '18 at 8:38

It is worth looking at Libre Office as a conversion engine. It can run on multiple platforms and can do a better job on some documents than even MS itself. It's free also. You would probably want something like Docmosis (please note I work for Docmosis) or JODReports (open source) to help with the scaling, but you could also write this aspect of it yourself.

The good thing is you can install Libre Office and run command line (or manual tests) to decide whether: a) the conversion to PDF is good enough (accuracy) b) the performance is good enough

To try it, install Libre Office, then use the command line:

soffice --convert-to pdf <file>

to run a convert. You can also specify a directory to convert all the files there.

I hope that helps.

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You can use the command line tool, docx2pdf to batch convert word documents to pdf on Windows or macOS: https://github.com/AlJohri/docx2pdf


pip install docx2pdf


docx2pdf myFolderOfWordDocs

Disclaimer: I wrote this tool.

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You did not specify the version of Microsoft Office, nor the operating system of the computer on which the conversions are to be done.


Microsoft Office applications have a SAVE AS… option for saving as PDF; you can use this via VBA or a scripting language that supports COM objects (e.g., PowerShell or VBScript).


PanDoc supports conversion between many formats, including Microsoft DOCX and (as an output format only) PDF.

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If you can't find a satisfactory solution that's free, consider trying our LEADTOOLS products:

  • If the conversion needs to be done on a computer that doesn't have MS Word installed, you can use our .NET Document Converter classes. You can find more details here
  • If the computer has MS Office or any program capable of printing Word files, you can go with our ready end-user program LEADTOOLS ePrint printer driver and file conveter. You can select one or more Word files and "print" them to our PDF printer. This can be done by right-clicking the files and choosing "Print". Our virtual printer gives you the ability to control several aspects of the conversion to PDF (or 150 other file types).

Both the .NET SDK and the ePrint converter have free evaluation editions you can try before you decide to purchase. Also, email support for all our products is free even during the evaluation period.

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You may use "Adobe Acrobat Pro DC" for converting your Word docs into PDFs. It also fullfills all your criteria mentioned in the question.

Acrobat Pro DC is a paid software, but you can use it as a trail product for 30 days with all its features available until the trail period ends.

To know how to convert your multiple word docs to PDFs at a time (i mean bulk convert), see the steps followed in the images below

Step 1- click on the tools option on the top ribbon and then select "Create multiple pdf files" enter image description here

Step 2- click on "Add files" enter image description here

Step 3- Then... enter image description here

Step 4- select the word doc files you want to add enter image description here

Step 5- Then click on the OK buttom. enter image description here

Once done, the wizard will guide you through the rest of the steps.

You may download acrobat pro DC from here.

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