Here’s my situation. I run the word processing center for a medium-sized law firm in New York. Often we’re called upon to print large numbers of documents of varying file types. The size of the print jobs can run from a hundred or so pages to thousands of pages.
If I’m handed a CD with a large number of pdf files, that’s no problem. Acrobat’s batch printing capability lets me simply send all the files to a high-speed printer. If it takes an hour, so be it – no operator attention is required.
But where it gets problematical is when I’m handed something with multiple file types, or if I get a zillion e-mails with attachments of various file types. I have to then have an operator sit there and print everything. If there are Excel spreadsheets, the operator has to make sure that each entire workbook is printed, not just the active worksheet. And he or she has to make sure that pages are resized if necessary.
I’d really like to find something that lets me simply send the whole bunch of stuff to print, without having to worry about file types or print commands (for example, when printing many Word documents, messages will pop up that warn of bad margins, or require the operator to decline to save changes, and so on, and the print job just waits for a response).
Well therein lies the explanation of why you are unlikely to find something that fits the bill:
You are dealing with settings that could very well be specific to a document. One document you might want to print one way, the other you might want to print some other way.
Most of those settings are not printing-related settings but rather document settings from a host of different applications by different vendors.
So you’d need a program that knew how to interface with a whole bunch of formats/applications and also be able to let you set rational rules/defaults as they pertain to those formats/applications. You might be able to find something that can handle all MS Office formats like that (although I still have my doubts), but something generic enough to be able to print images, diagrams, and such in various formats automatically is very unlikely to exist.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m looking for. Hope springs eternal. I just hate to have an operator sitting there doing essentially unskilled work, just clicking the mouse, while other work piles up.
If the operator is just printing why can’t she make that a side job? You could be answering the phone, while scanning jobs to print. Or you could be doing any number of things.
I once worked for a company where they’d have someone fax things (this was in the 90s). My first day as manager I was like, “Why can’t you answer the phone and fax things.”
Seems no one had heard of that. When I was in H/R, same thing. The person printing and faxing in the office, just did that. I put her in the reception wing and got combined the two jobs.
Anyway I know that doesn’t answer your question but, the fact Adobe PDF was made specifically to create one standard, so you don’t have multiple issues, probably leads to the answer your not gonna like.
You probably could create batch files and such but the results would be poor. For instance, and Excel Workbook could have hundreds of pages but only two with writings on them. So it’d print out all the pages in the book regardless and then you’d have to sort them
When you say things like:
How is a program going to know?
I would say you probaby could find a good IT person to set this up, to get some results, whether you’d like them or not, I don’t know, but it probably wouldn’t offset the cost of combining jobs. There’s no reason why a person can’t print, fax, sort, and do all sorts of “mundane” tasks at once. They say they can’t but they can
If you look for a batch PDF converter you’ll find a few programs that might help you out somewhat – however, they most likely have a lot of their own hard-to-modify defaults that might or might not work for you
Well, the operator could certainly be answering the phone. But I’d rather have him or her working on complex documents or other stuff than answering the phone. I hate having work pile up in here.
Acrobat’s batch capabilities are pretty handy, and help a lot. As to Excel workbooks, I’d love to just be able to print with the default for each file being “print entire workbook” and “fit to page”. That would speed things up considerably.
Oh, I know. I’d just rather have them working on the less mundane tasks. Our function is document processing, after all. If a lawyer comes in here and wants a complex, multi-layered, multi-page Visio document, I’d like to have an operator free to work on that rather than just printing stuff.
Yes. Acrobat can do that, to some extent, by itself. It can pull in documents in multiple formats, convert them to pdf, and print them, depending on how you set up the batch processing. And it’s pretty handy. But it has its limits. Like e-mails with multiple attachments. Or Excel spreadsheets.
