PDF2Office Professional 4

Introduction
About PDF2Office Professional 4
Download and Installation
Using PDF2Office Professional 4
Pricing and Support
Conclusion

Introduction

How often were you stuck with a PDF that had everything you wanted, but you'd rather have that content in a PowerPoint presentation or Word document. It happens all the time, especially if you create a PDF from PowerPoint or Word, and then lose the original file! We all know these things happen, and there are tons of other scenarios where a tool like PDF2Office can be a life saver.

About PDF2Office Professional 4

PDF2Office Professional 4 is from Recosoft, a company based in Osaka, Japan. You can learn more about their products from their site.

PDF2Office Professional 4 converts a PDF file to a fully editable Microsoft Word, PowerPoint files, RTF, AppleWorks and HTML files and with all original construction and layout of the document. It retains all the text styles, images quality, etc.

The application also allows batch conversion for multiple numbers of files at a time.

Download and Installation

Download the installer from link given above , run the setup routine and follow the instructions.

When installed, the add-in creates an PDF2Office tab on the Ribbon within Office 2007 versions of Word and PowerPoint. Users of older Office versions will see a PDF2Office toolbar in Word, PowerPoint, and Frontpage. Figure 1 shows the PDF2Office tab in PowerPoint 2007.

Figure 1: PDF2Office tab in the Ribbon

Using PDF2Office Professional 4

Follow these steps to convert a PDF file to a PowerPoint presentation:

1. Open Microsoft PowerPoint 2007.
2. Choose Open PDF File from the PDF2Office tab of the Ribbon, as shown in Figure 2.
3. 
   Figure 2: Open PDF File
3. This summons an Open PDF File dialog box, as shown in Figure 3. Select any PDF file, which you want to convert, and click Open.
4. 
   Figure 3: Open a PDF
4. This opens the Conversion Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 4. Remember that the Conversion Options dialog box looks a little different when launched from Microsoft Word.
5. 
   Figure 4: Conversion Options
6. The interface has three tabs, which are as follows:

7. 1. Processing Options

8. Here you can select the image type and the resolution. This is for any images that may be contained within the PDF, and does not apply to text.

9. 2. Advanced Options

10. This option allows you retain hyphens, mathematical formulas, etc.

11. 3. Font Substitution

12. Here you can choose a substitution for any selected font.

13. 4. Page Range

14. This option allows you to select a range of pages of the PDF file for conversion.
5. Once the selections are made, click the OK button to start the conversion process -- depending upon your original PDF file size and page count, this may take a while. While the conversion is taking place, you'll see a progress bar in a window (see Figure 5).
6. 
   Figure 5: Conversion progress
6. Finally, this will convert the PDF file to a PowerPoint presentation -- the converted presentation will be opened in PowerPoint.

Pricing and Support

PDF2Office Professional 4 costs $89.00.

Support is through e-mail, phone and fax.

Conclusion

We had problems with some pictures not making it to the converted PowerPoint file but Recosoft explained that those pictures used a proprietary format that's not encountered most of the time. Beyond this issue, the entire conversion was good.

At $89, the product is worth its cost if you can successfully convert even 2 or 3 PDFs.