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 vests) 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 7 August and sent it to print on 15 August, so eight days.
I will go with those eight days. Among other things it shows how memory works: we tend to remember dull, repetitive work as longer than it really was.
Those eight days are also the whole span from order to sending it to print, weekend included, not net hours worked. She did not note the exact time last year. I am leaving it without a calculation, anyone who does this kind of work will picture the difference for themselves.
And there is one more detail: this year the order also included drawing the laser contours for every piece, which they did not do last year. This year’s one hour and four minutes of export therefore covers considerably more work than last year’s manual clicking.
The script will not do the whole order for you. It shortened the part that used to be done piece by piece. That part took several days; now it is done in 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 numbers above hold for this one order and will come out differently in another shop. What is useful about them is not how many hours it took, but how those hours split.
An order like this has two parts that come one after the other. First the preparation: splitting the artwork into sizes, the spreadsheets, preparing for the cut and the checking. Only after that does someone retype name after name and export, or generate it from the spreadsheet. The script only touches the second part. The first stays as it was.
That the preparation is much the same either way shows in what the switch costs. On an old template with eight sizes, naming the pages and text fields takes about ten minutes, and nothing else gets redone.
On this order the preparation came to about eight and a half hours and the export itself to one hour and four minutes. Last year, when the same thing was done by hand, the order sat from being taken to being sent for eight days. One of those went on preparation, because that gets done either way. What was left was the manual part.
I am not going to calculate any further than that. Eight days is from order to delivery, not hours worked, and she had other orders running alongside. If I turned it into a number it would come out high and I would not be able to back it up.
The number I am missing is one you have. You are still doing it by hand, so you know what the retyping costs you. I have only measured the part after the script, you have the part before it.
Look at your last big order and separate out that second part. If it comes to a few hours a year, the script has nothing to save you. If somebody sits at it every week, put in their hourly rate and you have your answer sooner than from any price list.
One item will not fit into that calculation at all. What one reprinted piece costs you, you know better than I do. With manual retyping the mistake happens in the file and turns up on the finished piece, whereas the script sets what is in the spreadsheet, so there is one place to check instead of six hundred. That is not zero errors: a wrong name in the spreadsheet stays wrong after the export too.
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.
