FROM PRODUCTION
The numbers in this article are not mine. They were written down by the graphic designer at a customer who had the CorelDRAW version developed, while working on one large order.
The customer the CorelDRAW version was built for prints textiles. When his graphic designer called to say another big order was coming, I asked her to note down along the way how long each part took. I wanted the comparison with how it used to be done. The numbers below are hers and she was measuring her own work.
There were four orders with the same artwork, differing in what changes on them. On two of them the script only drew the contours for the laser. On one the optional graphics changed. And then there was the big one: 680 pieces, where each has a different number on the front and back panel, a name, a nickname and optional graphics, here used to swap country flags according to the rows of the spreadsheet.
The export ran by size, and these are her times:
That is 680 pieces in 64 minutes.
The times are rounded to whole minutes, so for the smallest batches they are not exact. The export itself runs at the same speed throughout, roughly eleven to twelve pieces a minute. For the script every row of the spreadsheet is the same work, whether there are thirteen of them or two hundred and thirty.
What does not change at all is the work before the export: load the spreadsheet, map the columns and go through the export dialog. With thirteen pieces that takes as long as with two hundred.
The export is only part of the order. Everything around it is done the same way whether you use the script or not: splitting the artwork into sizes, preparing for the cut, and the spreadsheets you check against afterwards. Compared with doing it by hand there is one single addition, and that is naming the text fields and pages.
Plus checking the finished data, which she did as she went, an estimated two to three hours.
Added up: about nine and a half hours plus checking, of which one hour and four minutes is the export itself. The rest is preparation that nobody will do for you.
She did the same order, 678 pieces plus extra ones, last year as well, back then by hand. On the phone she told me it had taken about fourteen days. When she then looked into her records, she found she had taken the order on the seventh of August and sent it to print on the fifteenth, so eight days. I am taking the lower number, even though the higher one would have suited me better for showing off the speed-up. And one thing is worth noticing: we remember dull manual work as longer than it really was.
Eight days are also days from order to delivery, not hours worked, and there is a weekend in there. She did not note the exact hours and could not find them afterwards. I am leaving it uncalculated, anyone who does similar orders will work it out for themselves.
This year there was also drawing the laser contours for every piece. Last year that was not done, they did not have the machine yet, so this year’s time covers more work than last year’s.
The script will not do the whole order for you. It shortened the part that used to be done piece by piece, took several days and has now dropped to an hour. Without mistakes from fatigue while copying and retyping names and numbers and placing them into the right sizes, without typos and without the wrong optional graphics showing up. The preparation before the export stayed the same, because it always belongs to this kind of work. In one sentence: the six hundredth piece is saved exactly as accurately as the first and nobody mistypes a single value on it. Everything is exactly as it stands in the spreadsheet the export runs from.
The graphic designer added that she is delighted with the speed-up.
The script this whole article is about. I have been writing it since 2025 for my own production and I use it daily. There is a version for Illustrator and one for CorelDRAW. The demo is free, limited by the number of runs and the number of rows in the spreadsheet.
More: exportPDF for CorelDRAW · pricing and licenses · support and FAQ. Related: what a small order looks like and where Print Merge in CorelDRAW ends.
