Print Multiple Document Types at once
Print Conductor is a small software for Microsoft Windows that can print multiple documents in a batch process which is invaluable if you happen to work with a lot of different formats and documents that you need to print out throughout the day.
The tool supports 16 file types including pdf, doc, txt, xls, ppt and dwg which means that the most common file types used in the work place are supported.
The benefit of Print Conductor is that you do not have to open all those applications to start the print job which can save a lot of time. The interface is as simply as it can be. Users can add documents by drag and drop, open a list of documents that have been previously saved or scan a folder or drive for documents of the type specified.
Scanning a drive will add lots - and I mean - lots of documents to the print queue. A test on my applications drive added thousands of files to the print queue. The clear all button removed them again without further difficulties.
The add folder option is useful nevertheless. If you have a folder with documents and files that need to be printed, you can point the program to it to do just that.
All printers installed on the system are supported by Print Conductor and their options can be accessed from within the software. Once the printing job starts a progress bar is displayed showing the complete status of it. This process can be canceled at any time in case something goes wrong.
Supported File Types:
PDF, DOC, WRI, WPS, RTF, TXT, XLS, PPT, PPS, POT, VSD, DWG, DXF, SNP, HTM, HTML.
Update: The developers have worked on the program ever since our first review of it. The latest version at the time of writing (March 2012) has been released in June 2011, adding support for new Microsoft operating systems among other new features. Among the changes is support for the new Microsoft Office document formats docx, xlsx and pptx.
Update 2: Read our review of Print Conductor 6.0 released in 2018.
It uses the COM/DDE interfaces of the “official” applications in order to print, there is no internal support for any of the formats, and you cannot define other interfaces.
So it will only print MS-Office documents if you have MS-Office installed (e.g. on a computer with Open Office installed, you can print .doc files with Open Office, but Print Conductor won’t print them), to print PDF files you must have the Acrobat Reader installed and set as default (no support for any other program like Foxit or PDF-XChange), you must have AutoCAD installed to print DWG/DXF files, etc.
It can print those files in batch, but only the file types you could have printed without it, and only if you had the original and official application to print them with.
Which can still be handy on some cases, for some types of users, but does drastically limit the functionality.