The Conversion That Broke the Form
A university admissions office receives 15,000 applications per cycle as Word documents, each containing a fillable-style table (name, GPA, program) plus three recommendation letters pasted as images. Staff convert each to PDF with a one-click 'Save as PDF' from Word. Result: the tables reflow across pages, some images vanish, and the resulting PDFs are 25-40 MB. Reviewers on tablets complain about slow loading. The office also needs to combine each applicant's main form and letters into a single file named by applicant ID. They have Acrobat Pro on shared machines and a 4-hour window per batch.
1. Why is one-click Save as PDF producing poor output, and what conversion approach should replace it?
Read the worked answer
'Save as PDF' from Word uses whatever PDF engine is bundled and makes layout decisions the author never sees. Symptoms map to causes:
- Tables reflowing across pages → the conversion engine is not honoring the document's page setup and table pagination. A print-oriented conversion that respects layout avoids this.
- Vanishing images → images with certain compression or linking may be dropped by the default engine.
- 25-40 MB files → images are being embedded at full resolution with no downsampling.
Better approach: use Acrobat's Create PDF (or the Adobe PDF printer/Maker) which preserves layout more faithfully, and apply PDF optimization with image downsampling (e.g., 150-200 dpi for screen review) to bring file sizes down. Since reviewers are on tablets, optimize for screen, not print. Test on a sample of 10 applications spanning different layouts before batching all 15,000.
2. How should the office combine and name files within the 4-hour window?
Read the worked answer
Combining 15,000 applications one at a time by hand is not feasible in 4 hours. Use batch processing:
- Convert all Word files to PDF in a batch (Create PDF from multiple files).
- Combine Files - Acrobat can merge multiple files into one PDF per applicant. The key constraint is that files must be grouped by applicant. If the naming convention already includes applicant ID (e.g.,
12345_form.docx,12345_rec1.jpg), sort by ID so each applicant's files are contiguous, then combine per group. - Rename the combined output to the applicant ID. If the tool cannot rename automatically, use a consistent prefix and a scripted rename afterward - manual renaming of 15,000 files is the bottleneck.
If the volume exceeds what a single machine can do in 4 hours, split across the shared machines by ID range. Validate output count (should be exactly 15,000) and spot-check 20 combined files for correct page order and no missing letters.