Microsoft Outlook - VBA - Save emails as PDF

Learn how to implement a VBA macro in Microsoft Outlook to easily save selected emails as PDF files to your hard drive, complete with step-by-step installation and usage instructions.

July 10, 2024 · 3 min read

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Christophe

Markdown, WSL and Docker lover ~ Insatiable curious.

Cet article existe aussi en français — lire la version française.

This article is over a year old but was reviewed on July 30, 2026 — the content is still accurate.

This article is part of the VBA & MS Office automation series:

Microsoft Outlook - VBA - Save emails as PDF

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TL;DR

This article shares a VBA macro for the Outlook desktop client that saves one or more selected emails as PDF files, added to the Ribbon as a custom button via the VBA editor. When run, it prompts for a save folder, whether to delete the emails from Outlook after export, and whether to name each PDF manually or from the email subject.

You may also need to select several emails from Microsoft Outlook and save them as PDF files on your hard drive.

In my case, it was when I was complementary self-employed. I had to keep track of the orders I received and the invoices I sent. Saving my orders as PDFs meant that I could keep them as archives, even if my mail server failed.

This post will explain to you how to create such a macro for Outlook.

Result

Select one or more emails, click the button, and the macro walks you through three prompts:

Five emails selected

A confirmation to proceed with the selected emails.
A folder picker — where the PDFs should be saved.
Whether to remove the emails from Outlook afterward, and whether to name each PDF manually or reuse the email's subject line.

At the end, every selected email is saved on your hard disk as a PDF.

Prerequisites

You should have Microsoft Office on your hard disk and you need to have Outlook and Word installed.

The macro will not work with Office online.

Installation steps

Just start your Microsoft Outlook client (as software on your hard disk; not in your web browser),
Press ALT+F11 to open the Visual Basic Editor (aka VBE) window,
Click on the Insert menu then Module,
Click on the link https://github.com/cavo789/vba_outlook_save_pdf/blob/master/module.bas to open my repository on GitHub and click on the Copy raw file button to copy the source code in the clipboard
Back to Outlook and press CTRL+V in the editor so you paste there the code,
Close the Visual Basic Editor and come back to Outlook,
Click anywhere on the Ribbon and select Customize the Ribbon...
In the new dialog, click on the New Group button
In the Choose commands from, select Macros, you should see the SaveAsPDFFile macro as illustrated below.
Drag and drop the macro to your new group.
Click on the OK button to close the dialog.