Sunday, January 14, 2007

How to merge multiple documents using PDF Creator

It had completely passed me by that Microsoft had dropped Office Binder in Office XP and beyond, because "usage studies... revealed that Binder was not heavily used". It's annoying though, isn't it, that just when you have a need for a feature that it's not there anymore.

A quick hunt on Google tells me more than I need to know about Binder and there is even a pretty scary tutorial on how to add Binder to your system from a previous version of Office - scary because the final instruction is about checking registry entries and undertaking a "repair" of your current installation.

What I wanted to do didn't feel like rocket science. I had four or five source Word documents that I needed to be able to print out in one step, in the right order, whenever required. The formatting of the various documents did not allow me to create a merged document by embedding each source document within it.

What I finally came up with was to print the documents using the "Wait - Collect" function in PDF Creator, then use the PDF Creator Print Monitor to combine the documents, then print into one single PDF file. Bingo, one document created from the source documents with formatting of each individual document perfectly preserved, and the objective achieved, which is the capability to print out the source documents in one step in the right order.

STEP 1

Print the first document, instead of using "Save" as you normally would, use the "Wait - Collect" option. Repeat with the second and any subsequent documents.



STEP 2

In the PDF Creator print monitor use the toolbar function to "combine" your documents, and then the function to print, which will output a single PDF document.



There's probably a number of ways of doing the same thing but this method has two distinct advantages:

(1) I already use PDF creator as my usual facility for creating PDF's so it's always have it handy

(2) PDF Creator is free, although I encourage you to make a donation if you find it as useful as I do


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very useful. I used that method when sending faxes from different sources into one fax.