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I need to convert roughly 200 .doc files to .pdf. I know Microsoft Office and Open Office can both save to .pdf, but I do not want to do this manually. Does anyone know any FREEWARE apps that will do this?

There seems to be millions of batch video and photo converters out there, why not document converters?


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2 Answers 2

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From the first link, pay attention to the command line example for printing to a PDF printer. You can put this command line into a standard batch script easily to iterate over filenames.

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You can do it with a Macro. In my example I have a separate macro called CreatePDF that converts and saves the current file, and a text file temp.txt that contains the list of documents to be converted.

Sub ConvertAll()
Dim fname As String
Dim doc As Document
Open "c:\temp\temp.txt" For Input As #1
Do While Not EOF(1)
    Line Input #1, fname
    Set doc = Documents.Open(filename:=fname, ConfirmConversions:=False, ReadOnly:=True, _
    doc.Close SaveChanges:=wdDoNotSaveChanges
Close #1
End Sub

I prefer to use Word to do this sort of thing, as there won't be any wonky formatting issues.

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Word is not freeware, no? –  maxwellb Jul 13 '10 at 19:15
it isn't, but I DO have word already –  thomas Jul 13 '10 at 19:24
@thomas: consider adding "(preferably)" before free in your question for future searchers. –  maxwellb Jul 13 '10 at 19:30

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