I was looking for a way to turn Outlook desktop emails into PDFs. In the past I just printed to PDF, but I had a new use case where I needed to attach the contents of emails to QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks doesn’t like msg file attachments.
My initial searches on how to make an Outlook email into a PDF turned up programs that were designed to bulk convert emails to PDFs. I, however, needed to have a quick way to turn one email that I was looking at into a PDF. Not a whole folder or PST file. That problem required more digging since most advice to that particular problem is to use a PDF printer. It works, but if you need to do that a few times a day you are using quite a bit of time. Not a huge problem if you have lots of time, but I don’t.
I also tried some code I found to make a macro and using Word in the background, but that wasn’t really quick either and I had some reliability issues.
So I kept searching…
In the end I found four programs that could do what I wanted:
- Sperry Software’s Save as PDF
- Wide Angle PDF Converter
- AssistMyTeam’s Email to PDF for Outlook
- FileChimp
If you are in the market for software that converts your Outlook email to a PDF you should try these. They all create PDFs that look a bit different from each other and had vastly different sizes. The headers that are added into the PDFs look different, some can handle images better than others, and they handle (PDF) attachments differently.
I could not try Wide Angle PDF Converter since it just didn’t run on my system. The tech support was nice and prompt, but they were not able to solve the problem. I am still running Outlook 2010 (why upgrade if it works for me?) and this is not officially supported – so maybe that was the issue.
Of the three I had left FileChimp was in the end the winner for my use for the following reasons (in no particular order other than the length of the lines):
- It produces small files
- I have not seen issues with images
- It works in the background while I keep working
- It saves all attachments I tested as attachments in the PDF
- I can have preset one-click folders that I can even add into the ribbon as buttons
It is by far the most expensive one of the bunch, but it is worth it for me since it is the fastest way to create PDFs from Outlook emails to select preset folders.
The one-click folder selection with background processing can’t be beat for me and the files are good and small as well.
The software has lots of features that I don’t use and probably never will, but it does what I need it for brilliantly.
Every listed program can do more than I have mentioned here, so have a look at all of them and try them to see how they work for you. Each one fills a different niche, but they are a great starting point for your research.
Mark Krieger helps organizations and individuals to create systems for success, both on the IT and operations side and implement strategies for financial well-being. www.makbiz.ca