PDF Converter Professional 7 – A First Look

PDF Converter Professional 7 – A First Look

Program: PDF Converter Professional 7.0
Publisher: Nuance Communications, Inc.
License: Commercial
Price: List $99. Price on Apr. 3, 2011 at Amazon: $48.59
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Every once in a while, a program that’s designed for business use is so helpful and priced so reasonably that it’s useful for home users, too. That’s the case with PDF Converter Professional 7. I quickly bought my own personal copy.

I use it at the office to convert PDF documents into Word documents so that I can do redline edits ("Track Changes") to them.

I had been using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 for this purpose until recently. However, for some reason, Adobe Acrobat Pro was starting to convert documents using Word’s text boxes. If you haven’t ever dealt with them, text boxes are some of the most frustrating and useless functions in Word, at least in my opinion.

I found that some other people were using PDF Converter Professional, so I decided to give it a try. That was easy since Nuance, the publisher, offers a 30-day free trial. The download is 600+ megabytes. You can download the trial here, but use my Amazon link for your actual purchase to get a much better price

When I installed PDF Converter Professional 7.0, I was surprised at the number of programs to which it could integrate itself. How did I know? It gave me a selection window in which I could check or uncheck the integration options.

But, don’t worry — if you decided not to integrate into a program, or integrated and really didn’t mean to, you can easily change it from the Preferences settings. It recognized that I had Office 2007 installed, and displayed already checked options for Internet Explorer, Outlook, Excel, Work, PowerPoint. It also gave me options for integration with WordPerfect Office, Lotus Notes, Firefox and several other programs.

The PDF Converter Professional 7.0 program has three modules. First, there’s the main program PDF Converter Professional. This is the main workhorse – and functions as your PDF reader, also. The program automatically recognizes whether the PDF file has selectable text or whether it’s a PDF of images (e.g., scanned documents). If the text is not selectable, there’s a quick pop-up that asks if you want the program converted.

(click on the image for a larger version)

Or, you can get the same converter popup (if the document doesn’t have selectable text) by clicking the "a" toolbar icon which is the select text icon. There’s also a great Help file available as usual from the menu bar, but do you really need it? As you can see below, all you need to do is to hover your mouse pointer over a toolbar icon to get the explanation of what it does.

(click on the image for a larger version)

One of the important features, of course, is that you can "print" from any application (at least any application that can print) into a PDF file. Each print function creates one PDF, so if you’re printing a long web page, you’ll get one PDF file with multiple pages.

Then, there’s PDF Converter Assistant, which allows quick conversion of existing documents into PDF’s or existing PDF’s into Word, Excel, etc formats.

Finally, there’s PDF Create Assistant. This has some really neat options. The first is to create a PDF document for each file – in other words, it’s a batch conversion program. The second function lets you combine multiple PDF files into a single PDF file.

Finally, PDF Converter Professional 7.0 can create PDF files directly from scanners. Cool!

Download the trial of PDF Converter Professional 7.0 here. Use my PDF Converter Professional 7.0 link for your actual purchase to get a much better price