Someone has a need to merge files of different formats into a single file in a different format, and they have to spend $1500-2000 for a whole new computer to accomplish it?
That sounds like buying a jackhammer to crack walnuts, frankly.
You Mac cultists slay me, sometimes. 
Cheers,
bcg
If you are using Office 2007 you can dispense with the freeware/shareware. Microsoft has a print to PDF feature available for download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&displaylang=en
This eliminates one source of incompatibility, and perhaps one step from her process, depending on how she does teh Office -> PDF conversion now.
The OP says she does this daily. Do you do it to the exact same document every day? Like an updated daily report? Or is this something where you group 3 docs together for customer A, make a pdf; group 3 docs together for customer B, make a pdf; lather, rinse, repeat.
Assuming the former scenario, you can make a fourth summary doc (say, a Word doc) which contains embedded links to the other three. Don’t paste the contents of the other 3 docs, create embedded links.
Then you update the three base docs as needed for the day and save them. Then open the fourth summary. It will it auto-update from the linked docs so it displays the latest changes. Then you print that one doc as a pdf and you’re done.
If you do this for the same bunch of document sets every day , then you could create a summary doc for each. Another approach would be to create a folder, put one of each doc in there and create a summary doc based on them.
Then when you want to run a summary, just copy the desired docs into the summary folder, making sure to always use the same filename. Open the summary & print to PDF. Viola.
Missed edit window …
Depending on how organized your docs are and how comfortable you are with creating smarter shortcuts (or asking for help here), you could reduce copy-3-base-docs-to-summary-folder-and-print-summary-doc-to-pdf to just clicking a single shortcut. All using just the built-in features of Windows and Office.
Well, it depends on how much your time is worth, doesn’t it?
Even Acrobat itself has to create individual PDFs before merging them. It will actually go through the process of opening Word & Excel, pdfing the files, then closing the apps. It just automates the process.
LSLGuy, yes I currently use the Office add-in to directly save those docs to pdf’s.
Unfortunately, my scenario is more like your other example. I create/collate multiple unique documents for Company A, then create/collate other multiple unique documents for Company B. The unique documents are created in Word, Excel, and several other proprietary programs.
One of the snags that I’m running into is that when a particular .pdf is compressed the second time for the combined pdf, it’s altering some image backgrounds (changing a black diagram on a white background to a white diagram on a black background). I was hoping to keep all of the documents in their original format then compressing once to .pdf for the combined document but it looks like that’s just not an option right now.
I checked PDFCreator and it’s essentially the same as PDFReDirect in functionality. By going to each app and printing to PDFCreator, you’re doing the same thing that I’m doing now…creating individual pdfs and combining them into a final pdf.
The only reason why I brought up PDF Creator is because it has the queueing feature. This takes one (minor) step out of the process.
It’s minor, but… it may help.
Anything beyond that will likely require scripting the applications—each app needs to render its output. Fortunately, MS Office apps come with solid scripting support.
You could script it using something like VBScript. If you are not familiar with this type of scripting, here’s an example that opens Excel, and puts some data in a fresh spreadsheet.
If VBScript is not your bag, you can use a scripting tool such as AutoIT to do the work.
You would write a script that opens all of the “selected documents” in order, invokes a PDF tool such as PDF Creator, then does the merge.
I feel your pain.
I run the dev shop at a software company. One of our web applications has a feature which takes web pages, online forms, and pdf files and automatically merges them into a single pdf for archive & distribution.
After a lot of professional searching, we have found NO software library at any price which can reliably & accurately do everything we need. One is OK for backgrounds, but often screws up scaling. Another gets scaling right, but dithers images to death. etc. Most frustrating.