What Is It?

PDF To Word Converter is a very nice program to convert PDF (Adobe Acrobat format) files to Microsoft Word format. As you probably know there are plenty of freeware (and paid for programs) available to convert Word documents to PDF, this utility converts in the opposite direction!

Why Would You Want It?

So many documents are available in PDF format nowadays for all sorts of reasons. PDF provides a format that can be read easily by freely available software. These include portable options such as Foxit and Sumatra as well as the larger programs such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. PDF documents generally compress to a much smaller file size than the word processor equivalent, particularly if the documents contain images.

There are times when you want to take text from these documents to use in a new document you are compiling (Please be aware that you should respect Copyright in these situations!) You may have tried selecting text in a PDF then copying and pasting it into Word to find all the formatting problems that go with this. Also if the scanned documents are only needed as images then how do you get them into a word document in a simple and efficient way? PDF To Word Converter provides a simple quick and easy solution to this problem.

Why Do I Want It?

I produce many PDF documents using my Acecad Digimemo writing tablet as well as documents scanned directly to PDF. Some of these are converted to text using OCR software but sometimes I do not need this option.  I often want to attach handwritten notes or drawings to a single document which will include typed notes that represent details of a meeting or conference. This gives me a way to quickly achieve that rather than having a folder with a combination of different document and image formats.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Converts PDF files to MS Word or WordPad format

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

• Simple Single Interface
• Focused Options
• Simple to Use

More About What it Does in Detail:

The hellopdf website gives some information about the program as well as a tutorial and FAQs page. in terms of languages and changelog but says nothing about running it.

Free PDF to Word Doc Converter version 1.1

How to edit PDF files without purchasing an expensive PDF editor? How to extract text/images from PDF files? What you need is a PDF to Word Converter.

Free PDF to Word Doc Converter is such a desktop document conversion tool to convert Adobe PDF file to Microsoft Word Doc file - and it’s totally for FREE!

The program can extract text, images, shapes from PDF file to Word Doc file and preserve the layout. It can convert all the pages, or any pages range of the PDF file.

And it is a standalone program - you can convert PDF to Word Doc without Adobe Acrobat Reader or Microsoft Word installed!

Key Features:

• Convert PDF to Word and preserve the original layout of your PDF in an editable Word Document.
• Extract text labels, graphics, shapes from PDF file into Word Doc file.
• Convert all the pages, or partial pages of PDF file to Word file.
• Support Adobe PDF 1.0 - 1.6 formats.
• Can automatically open the output Doc file when the conversion is done.
• Several PDF to Word conversion options are available for a better result.
• Convert in a high speed.
• Easy to use software.
• Totally for Free!

Having installed the system and running the program the following screen is provided:

This review will follow the usual format of presenting the majority of information as screenshots backed up by further information where necessary.

(click on any picture to enlarge where necessary)

Taskbar Icon

GUI

All options as well as the input and output files are selected from this window.

The Options allow for the following:

1. The output files is automatically given the same path and name as the input file except the extension is changed from .pdf
2. The pages to be converted can be selected as All or within a range of page numbers
3. The ability to "Retain Shapes and Images" is selectable
4. The ability to "Uses Text_box" can be selected*
5. The "Default Font" can be selected
6. 
7. The option to "Open Document for editing after conversion" can be selected
8. The "Doc Reader" can be selected

   

and that’s it!

Having selected these options the only thing left to do is press the "OCNVERT TO Word Document" button:

Conversion is relatively fast and samples of the input and output are shown below:

Section from original PDF

Conversion with text boxes

Conversion with no text boxes

If you enlarge the samples you will see that the conversion with text boxes retains the layout of the original more closely and in fact without text boxes the page numbering has changed within the first 8 pages due to the loss of spacing. However if you want to edit the document the text boxes make this very awkward so you need to choose between accuracy of layout and ease of editing.

Help

The "Online Help" link provides access to the hellopdf website.

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

What is the ProReviewer Experience?

This is a very useful program that quickly and easily carries out the intended job. It is a good example of how to provide everything in a simple user interface. Personally I rate this as:

Simple - Does a good job - Covers essential options

What Could Make it be Better?

More control over formatting and fonts.

Batch processing of several files or all files in a folder.

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What are the Tags?

Popularity: 23% [?]

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Freeware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.