How To Save Multiple PDF Attachments And Batch Print Them

Imagine the following scenario: You have a couple of thousand emails, each containing a pdf file and you have to print all of them. Nightmare, I know. Most people would select each email, open the attachment and print it, right?

Today I will show you how to save multiple Outlook attachments and how to batch print them, provided they are pdfs. There are other solutions too, for other type of files and perhaps someone might have a better approach. If so, I would like to hear about it in the comments.

You will need the following programs:

• OutllokAttachView. This is an excellent freeware program that scans your PST file for attachments and allows you to save them in a specified folder, or delete them. Works with Outlook 2003/2007/2010
• Adobe Acrobat. Mind you, I am not talking about Reader! This is the Adobe solution for creating pdfs, it is rather expensive and I am sure there might be alternatives to that. However, I happened to have it available, so I used it. Again, I am interested in other approaches in the comments.

After you download OutlookAttachView, extract the contents of the zip file into a folder and run the exe. It does not need installation, it just runs as is. You will be prompted to restrict the search parameters. As you can see in the following picture, I wanted to search only for pdfs:

A few seconds later, you will be shown a list of the attachments that were found.

Select all the pdfs you want to save and press the second icon from the toolbar (or F4).

Select the folder where you want them to be saved and press OK. Note that there are quite a few naming options in case you want to include time of creation, date etc, but for most of you, selecting the folder and pressing OK should be sufficient. All of your attachments should now be in the folder you chose. Time to open Acrobat.

Go to “Advanced –> Document Processing –> Batch Processing…”

Select “Print All” and click on “Run Sequence”. You will be prompted to select the files to be processed, so point Acrobat to the folder where you saved your pdfs, select all of them (ctrl+A) and press OK. The files will start printing on your default printer. Please note that you will not be able to change any print parameters, so you might want to check them before.

That’s it!

PS: You might want to try something else before resolving to a program such as Acrobat. Go to the folder where you saved your pfd files, select those you want to print (or all of them), right click and select “Print”. In my case some files would not print properly, so I decided to go with the Acrobat solution.