ABBYY Software’s PDF Transformer Pro Version 2. As a purchaser of ABBYY’s original PDF Transformer, I was impressed by the software’s ability to convert PDF files to Word, Excel, HTML or Text formats quickly and accurately.

The company’s latest release, Version 2.0, now offers a couple of highly desirable new features, which have been much desired by users like myself for sometime now. Version 2.0 now offers the ability to create searchable PDF files. PDFs can be created from within a Word document; the ABBYY software adds a toolbar to word, and with one touch on the “Create PDF” button. In addition, PDFs can be created from within most other windows applications, by using the “Print File” function. This latest version of the PDF Transformer software also improves on its already impressive capabilities in converting PDFs to Word, Excel, or other format types. In general, PDFs containing primarily text are converted to Word quite accurately, with accurate preservation of the text formatting, and PDF documents columns of numbers are generally preserved well. The program runs into greater difficulty in transforming mixed text / number documents into the Excel format, particularly in preserving the format of the original document. However, quite often users are trying to convert financial documents, e.g., quarterly reports or budget documents, into a format, e.g., Excel, simply for the purpose of extracting the number data for use in analysis, while avoiding the need for typing in the data by hand, and format retention in this situation is not the primary concern. And, overall, the software does an excellent job of converting to Excel formats. Other new functionally in PDF Transformer 2.0 includes the ability to convert standard, scanned PDFs to searchable PDFs, which very useful for users looking for particular words / phrases in the document, but not desiring to convert to Word, with potential effects on appearance or formatting that it might entail. Always an outstanding value, with the additional functionality included in Version 2.0, PDF Transformer is now an exceptional buy, and a “must have” for most office and home computer users’ desktops!