Converting and editing PDFs online and on desktop
Why pay Adobe for document conversion when you can do it for free or very inexpensively? Several options are available for turning a PDF into a jpeg or an editable format, such as Microsoft Word. I originally went searching for conversion options when I lost my spreadsheet of banking transactions. Back in 2016, I couldn’t find anything that was usable, and so had to manually input the lost transactions from my bank statements. This was quite a chore, as you might imagine.
However, it’s 2019 and online document conversion has improved. I was very happy with the results I got from Convert-My-Image and Docs.Zone when I needed to turn PDFs of my artwork into JPEGs.
In addition to turning a PDF into a JPEG, These services let you:
- Combine PDFs
- Convert from Web to PDF
- Convert a PDF to Word
- Turn a PDF into an Excel spreadsheet
- as well as perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Eventually, I wanted a desktop document conversion app. So after using the free version a couple of times, I purchased PDF Element Pro from Wondershare. The PDF Element Pro subscription for Wondershare is about $90 per year. Adobe Acrobat Pro, the Great Daddy of them all, costs about $180 per year (@$15 per month). Granted you’ll get a receipt from Wonbo Technologies, which may show up in Chinese in your bank transactions (it was in English in Paypal, though). However, I think that inconvenience is worth half the price of Adobe Acrobat.
Here’s a quick comparison of the features of the two:
Adobe Acrobat, unlike the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, lets you edit, annotate, convert and create, and protect your PDF documents, too. You can make fillable forms and include a signature area, which is ideal for contracts which the user can fill out just using the reader.