In the past I have used software called pdf machine merge to email out personalised pdfs to students (sending personalised pdfs works well for certificates or project feedback). Unfortunately my license expired recently and I recalled that in theory you can do the same thing with adobe acrobat pro and word. In practice when I tried to work through a mail merge in word, there was no way to do a merge to pdf using the adobe plugin because the menu item didn't show in word.
After hours of searching/fiddling/updating I finally identified the problem. It turns out that my version of office wasn't playing nicely with my version of adobe acrobat. As I had the latest version of office (office 2013) I first had to update to the latest version of adobe acrobat (XI pro) AND then install the latest update for that version (to move to 11.0.10). Once this was done the "ACROBAT" menu required to do pdf merging finally appeared again in word. After that it was a fairly simple matter to do the merge as per these instructions.
