Powershell script for converting Word documents to PDF format

In my job, we only send documents to clients in pdf formats. Sometimes we have to send several documents at once and it takes a good time to open each one and save it as a pdf, it’s not a very pleasant task.

In order to minimize this problem, I’ve created a simple powershell script that opens a Word document and saves it as pdf without any user interaction. With such script, I can convert a lot of files at once, just like this:

ls . *.doc* –Recurse | %{ ~\scripts\doc2ps1.ps1 $_.fullname }

With this command, I list recursively each doc/docx file in a directory and save each one as PDF.

By default, Office 2007 apps are not able to save files as PDF, so you have to install the add-in from Microsoft first to use the script. The add-in is available here.

Bellow is the script, it’s also available in my PowerShell scripts repository at GitHub (http://github.com/dougfernando/utility-scripts/tree/master) as doc2pdf.ps1.

param (
 [string]$source = $(Throw "You have to specify a source path."))

$extensionSize = 3
if ($source.EndsWith("docx")) {
$extensionSize = 4
}

$destiny = $source.Substring(0, $source.Length - $extensionSize) + "pdf"
$saveaspath = [ref] $destiny
$formatPDF = [ref] 17

$word = new-object -ComObject "word.application"
$doc = $word.documents.open($source)
$doc.SaveAs($saveaspath, $formatPDF)
$doc.Close()

echo "Converted file: $source"

ps winword | kill

An important note, the script closes every Word instance in the end, so save any work previous using it.