If you regularly need to batch print folders of documents then you’ll know it’s a lengthy and tedious process: Ctrl+P+Enter+repeat until you die of boredom, essentially.

Print Conductor is a free-for-personal-use application which automatically lines up and dispatches your targets to their source programs for printing.

The latest Print Conductor release has a revamped interface with a modern flat look, and reorganised controls for improved ease of use.

At its simplest, you can just drag and drop your files onto the program and click to start printing. This works with 50+ file types – PDF, Office, DXF/ DWG, ODT, images, XPS, SVG, TXT, WRI, RTF and HTML, amongst others – as long as you have suitable source files installed (Microsoft or OpenOffice for DOCX, say).

Print Conductor 5 has a stylish new interface

But that’s just the start. The latest Print Conductor release can be more selective, including printing a specific page range of Word documents, or maybe printing PDFs without their annotations.

There’s new support for batch printing password-protected PDF, DOC and DOCX files.

Picture printing is smarter with a new option to batch print images in a “Fit in frame” mode.

Whatever you’re doing, the current document list can easily be saved for reuse later.

The program has a few issues. We clicked “Add Documents”, browsed to a folder, and found we weren’t able to sort documents in the Add dialog. That’s very annoying if you’d like to, say, sort by modified date to easily find the latest few documents, and instead you have to browse the list alphabetically and select them one by one.

Print Conductor is an effective print manager, though, and if you regularly need to print large numbers of documents then it should save you some time.

Print Conductor is a free-for-personal-use application ($49/ license otherwise) for Windows XP and later.