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Improving Meeting Pack build times
While we have built the Our Cat Herder Meeting Pack functionality to handle word documents, excel files, images, powerpoint files and PDF files, there are certain documents that can take a lot of time to process and slow down your Meeting Pack build time.
How the Meeting Pack Build Works
The Meeting Pack is dynamic so it builds the Meeting Pack document on the fly or in realtime each time a user requests it (when you click the Meeting Pack button in a meeting). This is done to ensure the user has the most up-to-date document at all times.
When the Meeting Pack button is clicked Our Cat Herder loads each document, processes it to PDF form, paginates the documents if requested, and pairs your user's unique notes with the pages they were added to.
What can cause the Meeting Pack process to be slow?
The Meeting Pack is processing all the documents that are not PDF documents (word docs) to PDF. So the more complex or large the word documents are the more processing time the word document(s) take.
The process will be particularly slow if any of your documents have:
- large files sizes
- background images
- large tables (particularly with financial data) across multiple pages
- upward of 25 pages or more
- pages in the one document with different sizes or orientations (so one doc with both A4 and A3 or both portrait and landscape orientation)
If you for example were to have a 100 page word document with tables, multiple page sizes and background images on every page it is unlikely the Meeting Pack would generate in a useful time frame. The good news is there is a way to fix this.
Documents not converting correctly
If a document does not look right in your Meeting Pack — for example the formatting is off, fonts have changed, tables are misaligned, page breaks are in the wrong place, or headers and footers have been added or removed — this is usually caused by the automated conversion from Word (or another format) to PDF. This conversion happens on our servers and while we aim to get it right, it is an automated process and may not always produce a 100% match — complex layouts, unusual fonts, or advanced formatting features may not convert exactly as they appear on your desktop.
The fix is simple: save the document as a PDF yourself before uploading it to Our Cat Herder. This way the document is already in its final form and no conversion is needed — what you see in your PDF viewer is exactly what will appear in the Meeting Pack.
How to save as PDF from Microsoft Word:
- Open the document in Word
- Go to File > Save As (or File > Export)
- Choose PDF as the file format
- Save the file and upload the PDF version to your meeting
This also works from other applications — most modern software (Google Docs, LibreOffice, Pages, PowerPoint, Excel) has a Save as PDF, Export to PDF, or Print to PDF option.
Always Preview
After saving as PDF, open the file and check it looks correct before uploading. This catches any issues before your members see the Meeting Pack.
How can I speed up the processing of my Meeting Pack?
Saving your documents as PDF before uploading also speeds up Meeting Pack build times. With all documents already in PDF format, the Meeting Pack can skip the conversion step and jump straight to combining them together, adding pagination and matching notes to the correct pages.
Smaller Files = Increased Speed
Generally the smaller you can make each of your files them the faster the process will run. The less files there are the faster it will run as well (although less files may not be practical in all situations).
Please note that the internet connection of the user requesting the pack will influence perceived speed as well because the pack has to generate and then the user must download it.For example on a slow internet connection a 100Mb file could take several minutes, but on a high speed fibre connection it could be a few seconds.