Useful internet software, websites and blogsites.: Convert Those PDF’s To Word. Get That Text Back!

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Convert Those PDF’s To Word. Get That Text Back!

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Convert Those PDF’s To Word. Get That Text Back!

via MakeUseOf.com by Karl L. Gechlik on 11/22/08

Anyone who has been involved in the computer game for more than a little while knows what a PDF is. PDF is a file format that stands for Portable Document Format. A PDF is meant to be non-editable and the body of the document is an image and not editable, or selectable text.

So if you received a document of say names and email addresses in a file called Leads.PDF. You can open the document, print the document and even send the document on to others. But if you want to import that information into your email address book, an excel spreadsheet or otherwise manipulate the data - you just can't.

Now as The Admin - can't is not in my vocabulary. No I do speak English and know what it means….but I started to look for an answer. Most of them came back to buying Adobe Acrobat Pro - Mucho Dinero. Not an option for the little guy. Then I came across all these little sites also promising to help me for $29.99 or $49.99.

I looked around the web and then I searched good old MakeUseOf.com and found this article by Aibek from January of this year. He ran down some popular free PDF tools. And low and behold he listed exactly what I needed. It's called…..wait for it….wait for it…

FREE PDF to Word Doc Converter

I downloaded it from the link above, installed it and was greeted with this screen:

The fields and options are not only straight forward but simple as well. Just input the file you want to convert by hitting the browse button on the left and navigating to your PDF file. It will automagically set the output file to be in the same directory with just a .doc extension.

You can set how much of the document you want converted and what program if any should open the .DOC after it is created. You can choose your font, and if you want images and shapes to carry over.

That's it. Click the "Convert to Word Document" Button and you're off. I sat back and waited for my 986 page document to convert and it only took a few minutes. It then popped up in Word 2003 - fully editable!

What do you guys use for converting PDF's to text? Anyone have any better or other solutions?

How do you get numbers into Excel from a PDF? Is anyone actually using Microsoft's version of the PDF format - called XPS?

(By) Karl L. Gechlik is a superhero of the IT industry who wears many hats and changes in telephone booths. Karl mostly uses his powers for good and the occasional hysterical prank. Get your geek on & follow his geeky antics at the NEW AskTheAdmin.com today. Show your support and check us out today! Where all your technology questions are answered for free!

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