This was the first time in a long time that I managed the check-in process of SQLSaturday Orlando and was surprised/dismayed to see that when I unzipped the download the filenames were all named with a less than helpful format; b9d73479-5a04-42a3-9f11-a56af7b56beb.pdf. The goal was to be able to quickly find the SpeedPASS for anyone that needed it printed and while search should look inside the files to find a name, I thought it would be faster to just have the attendee name IN the file name. I exported the registration list to Excel, added a calculated fullname column, then exported that to CSV.  My quick hack:

$list = Import-CSV “c:\speedpass\names.csv”

$list.Count

foreach($item in $list)

{

$fileToFind = “C:\speedpass\” + $item.InvoiceID +”.pdf”

$file = Get-ChildItem $fileToFind

rename-item -Path $fileToFind -NewName ($item.FullName + “_” + $item.InvoiceID + “.pdf”)

}

I see that Wayne has posted a solution that you might like better at http://blog.waynesheffield.com/wayne/archive/2017/03/working-sqlsaturday-speedpasses/ for printing all of them, if that’s the route you take.

I can’t help but ask, why not include the name from the start? Or, to dream a little more, how about simple Powershell forms app that would let someone type in a few characters of a name and show the resulting file matches, then click to print? During check-in its all about moving people through fast.