I have hundreds (or thousands) of Publisher files — how to bulk convert them

A shared drive that's been alive since 2009 can hide thousands of .pub files. Here's how to find them all, convert them in batches instead of one by one, and actually verify the output.

Converting one file is a drag-and-drop. Converting a decade of a shared drive is a project — but a small one, if you do it in the right order: inventory first, then convert in batches, then spot-check with the fidelity notes instead of opening every PDF.

On Windows, dir /s /b *.pub > pub-inventory.txt from the drive root gives you the full list in seconds; on a Mac or a Linux file server, find . -name '*.pub' > pub-inventory.txt does the same. Then zip each top-level folder and upload the zips whole — the converter takes folders and .zip files as they are, so nobody has to feed in files one at a time. One zip per department or per year keeps batches small enough that a flagged file is easy to trace back to its folder.

Two things make the arithmetic easy: a file that fails to convert doesn't use a credit, and credits never expire — $99 covers 1,000 files whether you finish this week or in the spring. The one hard limit is 50MB per file; set anything bigger aside for a manual look, along with any file whose note asks for one.