PDF Converter Elite 4 (Windows)
- Details
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 24 July 2015 01:00
- Written by Christian Dunn
The team at PDFConverter.com produce software to help you convert a PDF to just about any editable format. As PDF is the most common and compatible form of document for sharing with your partners and clients, improving your business workflow and efficiency when working with PDFs can save you a lot of time and money.
- Spend less time on revising and modifying your documents
- Prepare customized reports
- Replace paper with electronic documents
- Exchange documents instantly
- Have total document protection
- Cut your document archiving costs Handle scanned records
The latest software from PDFConverter.com is their beautiful PDF Converter Elite 4 which can provide your business with the most insightful way to create, edit and manipulate digital documents and is a great favorably-priced alternative to Adobe Acrobat. You can also try it free with their online converter or 7 day free trial.
In this modern world sharing documents with colleagues, clients and partners is always a challenge fighting through the myriad of formats and devices. The PDF has emerged the defacto industry standard due to it's wide compatibility and protection options ensuring that the document you send is the document received and it is not edited along the way. That does mean you frequently need to find ways to make PDFs or break PDFs and every business needs a PDF conversion or creation program today. If you have banged your head against the wall over the years fighting with many free or cheap PDF printers that you spent more time getting working than actually working or have found the save as PDF options in the latest Office applications don't give you the flexibility you desire then a dedicated PDF conversion solution is what you need.
I had the chance to get hands on with PDF Converter Elite 4 to test it out for myself and found it a pleasure to use.
PDF Converter Elite 4 has some great new features including:
- PDF to AutoCad conversion
- Custom PDF to Excel Conversion
- improved OCR technology
- improved PDF conversion results
The user interface is clear, concise and uncluttered. While full of features it is not going to appear overly complicated to novice users, or your sales team while generating that next winning proposal. The handy Quickstart tips will point you in the right direction from the start making the learning curve very small.
The clever dynamic toolbar avoids confusion by enabling and highlighting only the suitable buttons based on what you are doing at the time. It appears there are a few less options available than in PDF Converter Elite 3 however maybe I haven't found them yet as I found the simplicity and flow of the user interface was a breathe of fresh air making only the required features visible when I needed them so I didn't stumble around for an hour finding out what all the buttons did.
I like how easy it is to convert from PDF back to a wide range of formats and I found the ability to convert only a selected area one of those great idea features I never realised I should have been using more. The advanced options for custom conversion to Excel are fantastic allowing you to add/remove rows and tables which are all the things I found myself doing normally AFTER I had converted a PDF not before. They may take some practice to get used to but are a real efficiency boost. It is also good to see OpenOffice formats available for those taking the Microsoft-free approach. I also found conversion really quick and was surprised it could do this so rapidly. In the screenshot above I took a word document containing Lorem Ipsum and converted it from PDF to both powerpoint and word. Check out the samples attached where the OCR recognition worked perfectly.
Creating PDFs is a breeze. The program includes a simple create option or you can use the inbuilt printer driver (familiar to users of any PDF creation program) to print to PDF from any application. For those that have specific requirements there are a large number of options for adjusting security, compression, fonts an Office conversion settings that will make this easy. The improved OCR recognition does what it says it does and I found many PDFs that previously would have been a nightmare to convert had a reasonably good conversion result. In the above example I converted a basic powerpoint presentation to PDF and then converted it back to a word document and a new powerpoint document. Can you spot the differences? Check out the attached samples to see how accurately this worked.
If you have a large number of PDFs you want to convert to Word or Excel the inbuilt batch conversion tool allows you to do these in bulk saving you a significant amount of time. For lawyers, real estate agents, professionals who spend all day working with PDF paperwork this feature alone makes this worthwhile.
I do find myself missing some of the great PDF merge, reorder and extract features that allow you to combine multiple documents in different formats into one PDF but these are generally not included in products in this price range. I also found while this is a great conversion tool the viewing/reading options did not have the capabilities of many other PDF viewers but that isn't the primary purpose of PDF Converter Elite.
I had to test out the AutoCAD conversion having industrial designers in the family and the DWF or DXG formats mean you could use any compatible CAD or graphics program. I found the results received depend on the quality of the PDF generated. If you generate a PDF from a recent CAD program you should be able to capture multiple layers, hatches and text in the PDF that means they can be converted back from PDF to CAD with great accuracy. The OCR recognition also is a bonus converting any text into the correct format. I discovered the quality of your results will depend on the quality/version of the PDF and the method it was generated as many older PDFs or CAD programs couldn't capture these and as a result your conversion will be mainly polylines.
There is a wide range of document imaging/management software on the market and it is a competitive category I review frequently. This is a clear, concise easy to use application that definitely does everything it says it can with confidence. It is competitively priced and some of the great new features such as AutoCAD integration make it a must see for those in the design industry putting it amongst the top applications in it's class.
Don't take my word for it. Take their 7 day free trial and test it our for yourself or if you need to urgently convert a PDF file to or from Word, Excel or Powerpoint use their online free PDF converter. If you find it as useful as I did you can purchase the full version online for under $100USD (and better prices if you buy more copies for your whole team).
 Sample-Files.zip | 192 kB | 2015-07-24 |