How It Works
SWING Porter for Outlook installs as an add-on on your Microsoft Outlook ribbon. Once installed, you can export Outlook emails and folders by simply selecting them and hitting the Export button. Porter will also export your email attachments, by embedding them into the created PDF files. In addition to the manual email exports, it is also possible to set up automatic archiving of selected Outlook folders.
Below is a quick overview of the various types of export you can perform using SWING Porter.
Exporting emails to multiple PDFs
In order to export Outlook emails to separate PDF files, select your emails, choose the separate PDF files option and hit the Export button. Note that SWING Porter will use the default naming convention when saving your PDF files to disk, however you can also define your own naming convention using Porter’s Filename Editor (which can be opened in Porter’s settings).
Exporting emails to a PDF package
A PDF package provides a convenient way of keeping multiple emails in a single PDF file. In order to export Outlook emails to a PDF package, select your emails, choose the PDF package option and hit the Export button.
Exporting emails to a PDF binder
A PDF binder allows you to save multiple emails in one long PDF file which also features an automatically generated table of contents that lets you jump from one email to another quickly. In order to export Outlook emails to a PDF binder, select your emails, choose the PDF binder option and hit the Export button.
Exporting folders
In order to export the current folder to PDF, first click on the folder (e.g. Inbox), then choose a conversion profile (“Current folder to…”) and the destination folder, and finally hit the Export button. If you need to export other folders, choose the Other Folder(s) option, hit the Export button and using the pop-up window that comes up, select the folders you wish to export.
Note that if you’re exporting folders to separate PDF files, Porter will automatically generate a folder structure on your disk, and place the PDF files in corresponding folders. Also if you’re exporting folders to a PDF binder, Porter will then create a table of contents in the PDF binder which will again be structured in the same way as your Outlook folders. This will allow you to navigate through your emails in PDF similarly as you did in Outlook.
However when exporting folders to a PDF package, your folder structure will not be preserved, since the PDF package format doesn’t support hierarchic folder views.
Automatic archiving
Automatic Outlook archiving can be easily configured by simply creating an archiving job in Porter’s settings and selecting the folders that you wish to periodically archive. Once your archiving options are set up, the archiving job will run according to the schedule you specified (note that Outlook must be turned on in order for the job to run).
The image shows a sample Archiving job and the available options.
Exporting and accessing email attachments
SWING Porter provides four options for processing email attachments shown on this image.
Once your PDF files are created, the embedded attachments can be found in the Acrobat Reader’s attachments pane, or you can also simply double-click on the attachment icon on the PDF page in order to open the attachment.
If you choose to convert email attachments to PDF and then append to the main PDF file, the end result will be a PDF file comprised of the email content followed by the content of the converted attachments. Note that Porter uses Office automation to convert file attachments to PDF, so Microsoft Office will also need to be installed on your machine as well. If an attachment is of an unsupported type (e.g. zip), it will get embedded in the PDF file in its native format.
