Check out this link:  http://www.pdftoword.com/ (thanks to a tweet from @perrybelcher). I haven’t checked out this online conversion service myself as I did in the other posts. But the results posted in another blog look astounding.

Here is what the authors say about their service:

“While it’s not possible to replicate the exact formatting and appearance of the original file used in creating a PDF, we believe our free PDF-to-Word converter produces more accurate results than any other tool out there, including the most expensive desktop products…”

“When you need to quickly re-purpose PDF content in Word, it must also be well formatted. Unlike most PDF-to-Word converters, we use the full range of formatting and layout tools available — including paragraphs, columns, tables, and margins — making pages much easier to edit and manipulate…”

“Pictures, photos, vector images, and Excel charts are all examples of graphical elements that might be contained within PDF files.

Our PDF-to-Word converter is designed to convert and accurately re-position all of these upon conversion. Even for complex drawings and shapes with textures, patterns, and fills, we replicate the images, while maintaining editing capabilities.”

The two examples shown in the blog - an IRS form and a poster including text and graphics - make this a pretty outstanding service considering that the forms were scanned (but not OCR’d, at least no mention of OCR was made in the blog). And what’s best, the service is free.

I was alerted to another FREE online conversion service: PDF online.

I gave it a shot and tested it with a 35 page file (similar to the big one I mentioned earlier on).

Here are my test results:

Impressive speed - uploading and downloading obviously depend on your broadband speed (I’m on 8MB, well, nominally…)

Conversion takes a moment. But hey, 35 pages and a little wait beat what I did manually with this file a couple of months ago (the job still isn’t finished).

Saving to disk as a Word file takes the longest of all the tasks. You simply have to wait. A minute or two.

Accuracy - this is the biggie. I’m afraid, the product I recommend earlier on, Able2Doc, beats it by quite a margin.
Here is why: Take the copyright symbol as an example. It wasn’t picked up correctly even once by PDF online, while it posed no problem for my favourite software, Able2Doc. As the copyright symbol is on every page in my document, this was a niggle since, in this case, it was replaced by a few different symbols which means I had to verify and run “Search and Replace” several times. (Tip: In the end, I copied the correct version into the footer and deleted the line wholesale.)
There were also other inaccuracies, but this was to be expected in such a job.

VERDICT: For a FREE service, PDF online beats the other free service I mentioned in speed and convenience hands down. If you have relatively short documents, it’s simply Great Stuff. However, if you want to reduce your proof reading load, use Able2Doc

Recently, I had to convert a large pdf file to Word for editing and formatting. I had the pdf file in both image and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) format.

One way was to copy the pdf text and then paste it into a blank Word document. That’s how felt after a while. No way!

The obvious always take a bit longer! A few days after feeling pretty beat up about this, I woke up with the thought “pdf to Word converter.” It was a true Homer Simpson moment. A couple of hours later, I tested five different packages.

The good thing about all the packages was that they let you download limited trial versions. I ran the same test on all of them, the same few pdf pages, to test their claims of great, user friendly, fast, accurate, preserve formatting etc.

Hmm…, great claims, but in the end there was only one clear winner:

ABle2Doc available from Investintech, a Canadian outfit. It beat the competition on user friendliness, accuracy and, above all price. Here is what Investintech says about its product:

“Fast, Accurate PDF to Word Conversions - Able2Doc 2.0 performs fast and accurate conversions to Word with columns, tables, headers, footers, graphics and layout reproduced just as they were in the original document. Maximum editability is ensured!”

Here is what I found:

The software is easy to use, lets you convert an entire document or just a selection. It works pretty intuitively, in three easy steps (straight off the file menu with some very helpful pop-down help graphics - do you read instructions or Help files?). In short, it does what it states on the tin.

Best of all, I could buy a 30-day licence for less than $25!! This clinched it for me. At the time, I only had this one document to convert (albeit over 350 pages long). I was happy that I didn’t have to pay for a full licence. I got the job done in half a day. And then had a great proof reader who I found on elance.com. If you wish to contact her, click here. Fabulous!

If that sounds useful, you can purchase Able2Doc at 40% discount by clicking here. With this discount, you have the 30-day licence for only $16.76!

Another contender was a free online service:

www.zamzar.com - it’s online, it’s free and it works. You upload your file, they convert it and send you a donload link. As it’s free, it takes a while. The service is fine for small jobs but was not suitable for my humdinger of a file. If you have only occasional need for small documents and you’re not in a hurry, then it’s great.

Next in line was deskUNPDF. It did OK but I found Able2Doc more accurate on the test run. And, of course, on price, the 30-day licence of the winner clinched it for me. deskUNPDF is available from www.docudesk.com.

Finally, two contenders were not acceptable at all for me:

Smart PDF Converter converted my OCR file into an image. I didn’t even bother to find out what had gone wrong as the test was identical to the others. For what it’s worth, you can find it at www.pdftodocconverterpro.com.

Pdf to Word preserved the image behind the text. That meant having to delete the image manually on every page before I could even start checking the text. Totally unacceptable at www.verypdf.com.

So, the winner is by a fair stretch and even more so at 40% discount: Able2Doc