This program isn't much use. It does bizarre things to formatting, over-strikes lines of text, and will mirror image logos with text. By the time you get done trying to work around the problem, it's almost defeated any time saving that converting the document would have had. I would have been irate if I had bought the program.

For the record, I am using Windows 7 Ultimate & MS Word 2007

#44 said, the only dumb question was the one...
so here goes,
why 13 or so hours AFTER yhe man told us to use 'unipdf' (also happens to be his personal favorite) are people still d/loading this"giveaway" and having trouble? somedays companies approach gotd with good quality s/ware, some days it's just software and giovanni helps us out with something better. thanks to gotd and giovanni, especially since mr dot-tech-i'm-too-busy to come around anymore just abandoned us... ha.
please no cards or letters, i'm just pokin at him since he's not here.
thanks again to gotd, without you everbody would be saying "giovanni who¿"

michael clyde

Installed on Windows 8 pro 64bit, worx perfect and install was a snap.

For a PDF to WORD programme to serve any purpose it has to do two things. The clue is in the name.
It needs to;

1.) Convert the PDF to editable text. Not an image.

2.)Keep some degree of formatting that retains blocks of text in a readable sequence.

For heavy users, the Adobe is hard to beat for $20/yr. It's fast, and dependably accurate.

https://www.acrobat.com/exportpdf/en/pricing.html

What a disappointment. Last night I used my Wondershare converter and it was flawless. I tried the same pdf files with the PDFzilla and not one file converted. Three pdf invoices were converted to Excel. Empty Excel files came up. Two files were converted to Word and one heading came up. The rest of the file was a total blank. Waste of time.

hmmm that's strange!

So far UNIPDF worked great for me!!

Here is a full review of missing Ashraf (by the way...what became of him? Is he still alive?):

http://dottech.org/89142/windows-best-free-pdf-to-word-converter-pdf-to-doc-or-rtf

So even Ashraf seems to agree with me...

How about this?

http://www.pdfonline.com/pdf-to-word-converter

Have you tried it?

It's good at handling TABLES and at preserving hyperlinks.

Take a look at foxit Reader www.foxitsoftware.com. It has a free version that is awsome. I have been following GOTD for about 6 months and find some very good software. Just thought I would make a small contribution

This software converted several PDF documents to Word documents accurately for me. I am using Windows 7. I converted native PDF documents, PDF documents that had been generated from a scan and PDF documents that were Word documents saved as PDF files (using Microsoft's add-on for saving as PDF). All converted well including images. Colored boxes/shapes did not convert. Each line converted as an editable text box (which wouldn't be helpful if you are making massive changes to the document). In some cases, the text boxes were overlapping, but was easily fixed. All text was converted as SimSun font, regardless of the beginning text - even the one that originally started as a Word document in Times New Roman font. Drag and Drop worked (you have to have your folder to drag from open and drag from there). All in all, the product seemed to work as advertised for my documents.

#41 - None of us know everything, the only dumb question (regardless of how it's asked) is the one that didn't get asked for fear of looking dumb.

Microsoft Word 2013 will open a pdf file as an editable document. It can then be saved as a Word document or a pdf. Programs such as this gaotd are no longer needed.

#5. Duane D. Yes, that was a dumb question as Word has the ability to save a document in PDF format.

Very fast compared with the freeware UniPDF, but does not maintain font in many conversions, AND also with numerous errors (overlapping) here and there. I will prefer UniPDF, which convert almost perfectly,without needing any correction, actually saving me more time. Another one I tried, but payware, to consider is Docsmertz PDF Platinum, but costs $69, and can even convert to .docx directly, and also other fuunctions such as editing pdf file in a Word interface before converting to Word.

Very poor conversion. Tried it on a PDF having headings in bold type and one text box in the document. Layout and bold were not preserved, font changed, word spacing not preserved, letters jambed together.

Free alternative: http://www.nemopdf.com/pdf-to-word.html (only does .doc or .rtf though, must purchase to also do excel files)

This is big improvement over the previous version, and eliminates the need for a couple of other programs I use (for splitting and merging). I think the price is a little high but I've paid more when I needed something in a pinch. Overall thumbs UP.

Unable to install the program. Seemed to crash when connecting to GOTD's website. I tried re-downloading with same result. Dang, would have liked to try this one.

would save only a random 50% of a page, some times the first 50%, sometimes the last. don't know if that's all it converted, but that's all i found in the resulting file. and, yes, i did properly register it.

Useless. Does not work with utf8

Answers:

OCR?

No. An image-of-text PDF becomes merely JPGs in a .doc, NOT editable text.

Text PDF to text .doc?

Yes, BUT there's a carriage return at the end of each line in the Word .doc, so this is NOT an intelligent conversion, makign a .doc text file that is horribly painful to edit after conversion.

Earlier: "... My questions: OCR conversion? When converting a TEXT-based PDF is converted to a DOC, is it a TEXT-doc or a JPG-doc? ..."

Ooops, I meant to separate OCR and text-to-text.

OCR: Does PDFZilla have OCR? (Converting an PDF image-of-text file to a text file?)

TEXT: Does PDFZilla have text output from text input? (Does it only convert a PDF text file to a "picture" of that text -- a JPG -- within a .doc file, or does it convert a PDF text (or a PDF image-of-text) file to a text .doc file, not an image-of-text file?)

I had a coupld of png files, long skinny unreadable tutorials I had downloaded from DeviantArt for learning Photoshop. Irfanview sizes them fine and scrolls however, I wanted PDF format just because. This was just yesterday and today her comes a program that says image to PDF and it was on! Well, just FYI it does not support PNG format, like SO many other programs (??) so I had Sage Thumbs on my right click menu ( a MUST for anyone into images) and rignt from there it will convert so I converted the png to jpg and reloaded the tutorial and bingo it converted the file perfectly to the pdf which also works perfectly and opens with my adobe pdf reader program. Couldn't have been here for me at a better time. So repeat, don't bother with png files, you will get a "file" that is zero byte thought it will put it where you want it. convert first to jpg with Format Factory or my choice I use now because of the right click feature, Sage Thumbs. By the way, after you click register and input the number close program and reopen, which I did and all ok, I clicked on image to pdf and it minimized with a seemingly blank tab on taskbar, so don't be impatient, soon as I right clicked it and clicked close window ( I'm on win7 64-bit Home, ) it had just then begun to open the image to pdf interface so I jumped the gun. it closed the image to pdf window but the main window stayed open so i reclicked on image to pdf and that UI opened and went on from there. thank you, nice for what I needed just now. GOTD you have helped this lady of fixed income grab the programs she needs for free over the years and I am grateful. Got too many of them, but what the hey, u go round once! cheers, kat

Can this software display pdf files before converting them?

I did not download this from GOTD, but have it from elsewhere.

Actually, I much prefer PDFZilla Ver 3 to Nuance PDF converter.

For those who want OCR, they can convert the PDF to an image.

Then use a software like ABBYY Finereader to OCR the image to editable text. Hope that helps you.

@Giovanni: Just tried UniPDF to see how well it would convert a pdf into a Word doc, but it converted two test pdfs only into an image in a Word doc. That pdf text did not convert to Word text. And I had set the settings to convert to a doc.

But I love your posts - you have led me to some other very usable apps.

Disappointed! - text jumbled on top of itself and output is not accurate. I use Wondershare PDF to Word and it gives me what I expect - a reliable output, editable, with the layout almost a perfect match with the original PDF.

PDFZilla 3 downloaded easily and installed fine on my Windows 7 x64 laptop. It converted several PDF files accurately, including graphics. No muss no fuss. I won't need it often, but I'm as glad to have the latest version as I was earlier ones. Thank you for a helpful product.

Further to my previous post. Just tried to convert pdf to excel, failed big time, it only created a xls file with no data at all.

Focht3,

I assume that when you wrote that the "execution is very poor" and "formatting in Word is terrible" that you were referring to PDFZiilla 3 and not http://www.pdftoword.com

Please correct me if I've misunderstood.

Earlier, ".. Converts only to the old .doc format (Word 2003), not to .docx! ..."

That's a GOOD thing! .docx is not compatible across all time and all versions of Microsoft Word, .doc is.

My questions: OCR conversion? When converting a TEXT-based PDF is converted to a DOC, is it a TEXT-doc or a JPG-doc?

Thanks.

Earlier: "... convert PDF to DOC files. But will it do the reverse? ..."

Seriously? Any free PDF CREATOR will do that, later versions of Microsoft Word have a native PDF export, and you can always print to a PDF printer driver as a file on disk, no charge.

@ #10 Paul "...the original font, Bell MT, was changed to SimSun."

Question, do you have the Bell MT font on your computer?

Probably not, but I bet that SimSun is. Probably the Bell MT font was embedded in the PDF but once you converted it the conversion will look for the closest matching font on your computer and will use it. The conversion WILL NOT add a new font to your system.

I am Daily using this litte gem for years now and it does Everything it says. A good program!!

I have now dumped ALL my other PDF programs, even the ones I paid for like PDFPro (conversions were not very good on webpages anymore I was finding - I use www.pdfmyurl.com for them now).

I do need to occasionally cut pages, compile PDFs and lots of other things like that with PDFs, so I just use PDFill as I have found it the best. The interface is primitive, but it just works and unlike previous versions, now it no longer needs Java anymore.

http://www.pdfill.com/

I am sorry PDFZilla, but I find their program is better than even yours (apart from their GUI that is) and it is free. I feel you need to beat them if you are selling your program. Add more features, make it easier to use, point out how much nicer your program looks than theirs. These are the sorts of issues you need to address to compete with the freeware offerings.

Giovanni, thank you for all your great posts. Your analysis and advice are always such a great help. I am sure there are thousands of lurkers like me who rely on your posts everyday to decide what to do with all the great and not so great GAOTD offering. So, thank you again and please keep up your great, unbiased reviews. Many of us are relying on you.

nothing special :P

includes:

FreeImage - an Open Source library project.
pdftk - Open Source PDF Tools


but works, I chcked:
PDF -> DOC, PDF-JPG, JPG -> PDF /think!!!/.

I decided to test this on an extremely complex PDF document; it had columns and images that spanned columns and partial columns.
The output was impressive, not a perfect Doc file but way above my expectations, as stated by a previous comment it does put the text in text boxes which impedes editing, it lost a lot of the formatting in RTF format but at least the text was not in boxes.
#8 Jay Fowler
Often a PDF file is just a series of images and when converted to Doc format it is retained as images.
#13 Giovanni
I obliged by testing your first free converter using the same PDF file as above and sadly it produced utter garbage.
The structure of a PDF file is extremely complex and variable, when considering this, today's download did a pretty good job.

Simple download and install on a Vista OS computer, easy registration, no unwanted sneakware and no request for personal info: kudos to the developer. About the only thing to look out for is the need to change the default output folder from, uh, c:\output to something within your docs directory.

Appears to have a multiplicity of features but only the PDF to Word conversion was tested, using five different sources.

Like every PDF to Word converter I've ever encountered, PDFZilla's performance ranged from good to hopeless. Good -- and actually, very, very good too -- was the blazingly fast conversion (less than 15 seconds) of a 22-page pdf originally derived from a Word document featuring a smallish amount of text on each page in different fonts and different sizes accompanied by variously shaped screenshot images.

Not only did PDFZilla accurately render every one of those 21 pages, the conversion when fed back into Bullzip for re-converting to .pdf went ahead smoothly (apart from having to instruct the software 21 times to ignore the 'outside printable margins' issue) and was almost as presentable as the primary pdf.

PDFZilla also fiahtfully converted a pdf of a Google Map document, viz: a three page compilation of route map and then two pages of street directions. This had originally been output as a pdf and not a hard copy; PDFZilla's conversion to Word managed an exact reproduction of the original, including the notes originally srcribbled in typewriter-style font into the box on page 1.

So far, so very good. But then. . . Disaster. PDFZilla was fed an eight-page A4 pdf of an original Word document, each page of which comprised either one very large or two fairly large images with three or four lines of Times NR text. As before, the conversion went at lightning speed but this time, PDFZilla retained only the images: no text at all was rendered, just empty place marks.

PDFZilla was then given two commercial documents to process, in this instance, online tourist brochures from two different US tourist agencies. The documents comprised everything from maps to images to directories of accommodation.

In neither case did PDFZilla manage any kind of conversion: no images were processed, no page formatting was preserved and apart from the odd legible line of text, no written information survived.

Verdict: time and again it's been my experience that pdf to Word software, no matter from which developer it happens to be sourced, is as dependable as the English weather. There's no set pattern as to what will work and what won't: one converter will easily manage a pdf to Word process at which another converter will fail totally.

Nor in my experience has there been much to choose between freeware and commercialware, because until the day dawns (and it's looking like it's still a long way off) when this kind of conversion software works 100% accurately, 100% of the time,then forking out large sums of money for it is more an act of blind faith than anything else.

It won't surprise me in the slightest to find comments on here from GOATDers who've tried this today and haven't managed even one successful conversion. Nor will it surprise me to find comments on here from other GOATDers who say today's software is the best pdf to Word converter they've ever encountered.

And that sums it up nicely: there's no guarantee PDFZilla will work for you, but then, there's no saying that it won't. . . so, if you are interested in this kind of software, then taking advantage of today's offer is very much a case of nothing lost in hope of something gained.

Thanks, GOATD, and thanks to PDFZilla.

@Geovanni, your input is always welcome, and I thank you for posting some of the better free alternatives to this apparently highly flawed software!

@Focht3, Thanks for the interesting website option! Doesn't require that you have your computer with you, and may even be accessible via an eReader with a browser!

Covert to pictures
- Works fine

Convert to text files
- Save in ANSI format only; does not support double bytes characters

Convert to HTML
- May fail the operation with an empty output folder
- Photos may become upside down

Convert to Excel
- Characters only; will not save pictures inside a PDF file

Convert to Word / RTF
- May have problem work with PDF with pictures only (a 68KB PDF becomes a 770MB word/RTF file; where Microsoft Word does not support files over 512MB)
- May omit background pictures

Convert to Flash
- Whenever it fails to convert the file, it will output the file with last successful input

PDF Merge
- Works fine
- Does not support password protected file, without warning message

PDF Cutter
- Works fine
- Does not support password protected file, without warning message

PDF Rotate
- May fail the operation without warning and output
- Does not support password protected file, without warning message

# 7 Upload DRM protected PDF to http://www.extractpdf.com/ you can then choose to download, text, images or fonts from the now unlocked PDF. I usually use Nitro Reader to extract text or images; better than Adobe, etc., and it’s free. Latest version at http://www.nitroreader.com/ (If Nitro can’t extract images or they come out black, again upload file to ExtractPDF.) Hope this helps.

# 8 I agree!

Thanks Giovanni, I'll try your suggestions as usual.

I frequently use the www.pdftoword.com website to convert pdf files to Word format. That website does a pretty good job of maintaining the formatting of the pdf document. The idea of this software is good, but the execution is very poor; formatting in Word is terrible - worse than non-existent! Word documents do not resemble the original pdfs at all. I am very, very disappointed.

If you only need an occasional conversion and can plan ahead (since the website can be slow), skip this package and use www.pdftoword.com.

I'm disappointed - had hoped for something really useful.

The program did not run on w7 very well. The conversion was awful PDF to word, unable to read at all.

Looks like a very good PDF toolkit, since, unlike previous releases, this tool is not just a PDF converter but also PDF merger & cutter.

Hope the developer has improved the final output, because if I'm not wrong previous editions of this tool turned out to be not very good in terms of final layout preservation (no time today to test it).

So my suggestion is to download it and enjoy it as much as you can (the update limitation should not be an issue here)

BEST FREE ALTERNATIVES (it would be nice if someone here was so kind to compare them with today's giveaway)

* UniPDF (==> My Personal First choice)
Great FREE APP, which enables you to convert any PDF files to JPG, HTML, or Text in batches, with all document texts, layouts, images and formatting almost perfectly preserved:

http://unipdf.com

See also:
http://www.ultimatepdfconverter.com
http://www.pdfcore.com

PDF ==> WORD
http://www.pdfonline.com/pdf-to-word-converter (can preserve hyperlinks)
http://www.pdfwordconverter.net/pdf-to-word-converter-features.html

To add, remove, delete pages, modify encryption, add watermarks, extract individual pages, optimize PDF documents for web viewing, cut & merge PDF files & pages for FREE:

http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html

Enjoy!!

Installation went smooth without any issues on Win7 x64-system.
Usage: pdf to MS WORD: drag&drop does not work; had to manually chose a pdf and add it to the list. Conversion: font changed, every single line was converted as a single text box (!) - so re-formatting impossible.
Lost interest to try the other features. Sorry!

All I get is the following even after updating my Adobe reader

If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF
viewer may not be able to display this type of document.

You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by
visiting http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.

For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/support/products/
acrreader.html.

I'm not impressed. I've tried a couple of documents that are in pdf. The documents that were, first created in word and then saved as a pdf, were converted fine but the original font, Bell MT, was changed to SimSun. Other documents that I have received in pdf, via email, that I don't know what their original format was. The entire document was left blank. I think Ashampoo's version is better. $ 49,95 is a ridiculous amount for this kind of software.

OK, Downloaded at an awful slow speed, 120K per sec, easy install code in readme.txt, now for the Test, on win7 ultimate, 64bit, lots of grunt too,
PDF Cutter Fail, long time to open (7 seconds), load file, freeze, have to close with task manager.
PDF Rotate Fail, long time to open (7 seconds), load file, freeze, have to close with task manager.
Merge Fail, long time to open (7 seconds), load file, freeze, have to close with task manager.

Now I have Acroread.exe *32 five times, end manually Sigh.

compatibility mode XP serv 3 not working still, try reboot
YES Works a treat a keeper for me

Any mention of whether or not this will handle a DRM protected pdf?
I bought the new Star Wars book the other day and it came as a pdf, and like to be able to read it on my phone or with calibre on my PC.

Does not work with RTL languages. uninstalled.

Okay.... Dumb question time. I've read that it will convert PDF to DOC files. But will it do the reverse?

I had version 1.2 from an earlier giveaway. I chose to install this into the same folder. The install was smooth and easy as the program found my installed program and start menu entry. The key is included in the readme file so that makes registration a breeze. You will know that the program is registered because the "register" link becomes unclickable. I don't use PDF that much and most of my needs are simple forms so this program works fine for me. Thank you GOTD team and to PDFZilla.com