Extract Tables to Excel

One of the many powerful features of Solid PDF Tools is the ability to extract tables from a PDF file to Excel. The same feature is also available in Solid Converter PDF to Word. You choose whether you want to extract tables from an entire document, from a single page or a range of pages. You can even automate this process with scripts.

Table Extraction Made Easy
Solid PDF Tools provides three convenient options for extracting tables from your PDF documents.

1. Use the Document Menu - Open your PDF, click the Document Menu and select Extract Tables to Excel.

2. Use the Right Click Contextual Menu - Simply select the page or pages you'd like to extract from in the Pages Pane, then Right Click and choose Extract Tables to Excel.

3. Use the Toolbar Button which automatically performs this function for you.

With each method a dialog screen will appear which allows you to select the pages to convert along with additional conversion options.


















The Exported File in Excel
In order to ensure accuracy, each table in your PDF file is extracted into its own worksheet in Excel.

Scan to PDF Using Solid PDF Tools

Solid PDF Tools provides a number of powerful scanning features for creating PDF documents, including:

• Scanning multiple pages into one or more PDF documents
• The use of automatic document feeders to scan multiple pages quickly
• Applying OCR during the scanning process to create a searchable text layer in your scanned PDF documents.

To create a PDF document from your scanner, simply open Solid PDF Tools and click Scan to PDF.















Next, select the "Scanning" features that best meet your needs:

1. "Scan As"- Allows you to select the best settings for each page based on the original document, create a document with the smallest file size, or set Custom Optimization setting via the Tools | Options dialog screen.

2. Text Features - The Text tab provides settings that allows you to create a searchable text layer (Office 2003 or higher) and Auto Rotate the scan. Searchable text allows you to quickly find needed information in a document.

3. PDF Output Features - Set your Output settings to Open, Save, or Save and Open your PDF document after it has been created. You can direct Solid PDF Tools to Save your new file in a specific location on your computer, and you can assign file names automatically.

To create your new PDF document click the "Scan to PDF" button.

Once your document has been scanned you can continue scanning, or you can crop, rotate or discard the scan and start over.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
Scanning a paper document produces an image file. In order to search a scanned file using keywords or phrases a searchable text layer must be applied. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature in Solid PDF Tools will allow you to add a searchable text layer, making your documents far more useful that ever before.

Upon completion your PDF document will be displayed in the Solid PDF Tools user interface where you can search for keywords and phrases, watermark all or specific pages, rearrange pages, combine other PDF documents with your new file, and much more.

Convert PDF to Word with Solid PDF Tools

Converting a PDF document into a Microsoft® Word document is easy with Solid PDF Tools. On the Solid PDF Tools Start Page, simply click the “Convert PDF to Word” link in the “Getting Started” section. Then on the palette choose a file (or files) using the file dialog screen.

















Advanced Options:
Using the advanced options dialog screen you can set specific conversion options that allow you to control Layout, Image Recovery, Table Detection and more.

Layout and Formatting
Choose the reconstruction mode that is most appropriate for the conversion of your PDF document.

• Flowing - Recovers page layout, columns, formatting, and graphics, and preserves text flow.
• Continuous - Correctly reconstructs the text order but will only recover paragraph formatting, graphics, and text flow.
• Plain Text - Displays text without any formatting or layout
• Exact - Uses Word text boxes to ensure that the text and graphic layout in the Word document is the same as the PDF document.

Table Detection
Table detection may be applied when Flowing or Continuous reconstruction mode is used to recognize page layout. This option is ideal for text documents.

Headers and Footers
Solid PDF Tools provides you with the option for converting headers and/or footers. This allows you to place them in Microsoft® Word's header/footer feature, keep them on each page as separate text boxes, or remove them altogether. To recover headers and footers you must select the "Flowing" reconstruction mode.

Converted File
Your converted PDF document will automatically open in Word for editing.

Convert PDF to Word on OS X and Linux

(or, why online services matter)

Once in a while we get customers that ask when we're going to port our software to OS X so that they can use them on their shiny new Mac desktop or notebook (a few people ask for Linux support as well, although they are few and far between).

The answers we've given over the years typically amounts to "Porting them would take a lot of work and we don't know if we could recoup the cost".

Over the years a number of "good" workarounds have come up. On Macs both Boot Camp and Virtualization software work well, if you're willing to spend the time to learn how to set them up. Similar options are available for Linux.

When we suggest them to customers we typically hear: "Buying Microsoft Windows, Office and possibly a virtualization product and learning how to use them together with what I already have is a lot of work, and we switched to get away from poorly designed software, your products excluded of course".

If you're in this boat, we suggest looking at some of the free services we offer online to:

• Convert PDF files to Word for Free
• Create PDF files for Free
• View your PDF files as HTML on your Cell Phone
• Validate your PDF files to the ISO 19005-1:2005 PDF/A Standard

If your computer has a reasonably modern browser, can send and receive e-mail, read DOC files and PDF files, it can use the above sites. They're free, easy to use, and do a few of the things that people commonly use our software for.

Why the Desktop Still Matters

If privacy is a concern (all your files are transmitted to the above sites and back without encryption) or you need to use some of the more advanced features of our software, we felt it would be useful to outline some of the options you have on OS X and Linux. Technical details on how to implement them are outside the scope of this post (honestly, there are so many resources available with just a few Google searches away the information would be redundant).

1. Dual Booting.

In a nutshell you divide your hard drive in two (or more) and install an additional operating system on your computer. When you reboot you get an option to boot into one OS or the other.

This typically offers the best performance of all the options available, at the cost of the inconvenience of having to reboot each time you want to use applications on an OS that you aren't booted into at the moment.

- Dual Booting on OS X.

Apple's solution for dual booting on their computers is called Boot Camp. Apple has the rundown on how to set it up on their website.

This requires an Intel Mac, a recent version of OS X (it was taken out of beta with version 10.5), a license of Microsoft Windows and a license of Microsoft Office for Windows (we recommend 2003 or newer). Be sure to read Apple's system requirements for the full and most recent list of what you'll need.

- Dual Booting on Linux (is now easy)

Linux has a number of different ways of dual booting with Windows, the easiest of which is called Wubi. As with OS X, you'll need a copy of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.

2. Virtualization

Virtualization is running Windows in a window so that you can use Windows applications on Linux or OS X. If this seems a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine (or a Yo Dawg joke) you're right, but so are so many other things we use on computers on a daily basis.

If you've got a little time, the willingness to read and/or Google minor problems and enough of a computer to run two OSs side by side, virtualization is a great option. This does require that you have a license of Microsoft Windows and Office to install in the VM.

- Virtualization on OS X

Newer Apple Macs (Intel based ones) can run virtualization products. Common applications for this include Parallels Desktop, VMWare Fusion and Sun VirtualBox.

Please note that no one in our offices owns any Intel based Macs and we haven't tested any of the above products. YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

If you happen to use our software on a Mac in this way let us and the other readers know about your experiences in the comments below.

- Virtualization on Linux

Two commonly used desktop virtualization products on Linux are VMWare Workstation and Sun VirtualBox. In our experience both are fine if you just plan on using the VM to run Windows applications.

If you plan on doing complex software QA (the kind that involves installing and uninstalling and installing and uninstalling...) you may find that VMWare Workstation is a better fit for you with it's better support for multiple trees of snapshots. Of course if you have no idea what snapshots are you may want to try both to see which works better for you.

- Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator)

From their website:

"Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop."

Basically this lets you run some Windows applications on Linux without the need for Windows.

This tends to work for a few supported applications but we haven't ever had good success with our own products. As with many things involving Linux, we cannot rule out user error on our part and are merely offering cautionary information :>.

We tried using Solid PDF Tools with Wine version 1.1.21 on Arch Linux. It kind of worked with a few files (formatting was lost) and hung on a few others that the product normally can convert in Windows.

If someone can suggest how to configure Wine to work better with our products we'd be happy to know (post comments, e-mail us, send a bananagram, etc.). Until then we'd suggest using Virtulization to use our software on Linux.

Did we miss anything you love? Feel free to contact us, or let everyone know about it in the comments below.

WYSIWYG Content Extraction

WYSIWYG Content Extraction

Extracting PDF Tables to Excel
Using Solid PDF Tools or Solid Converter PDF® you can quickly and easily extract tables or images from your PDF files for use in other documents.










With our new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) user interface you can extract tables from a selected set of pages within your PDF document with a single click.

• Using Shift+Click or Ctrl+Click, select the desired pages in your PDF.
• Right-click and select "Extract Tables to Excel". You can convert "All Pages" or a specific "Page Range" from your PDF.

Selecting "Launch Microsoft Office Excel" will open your converted content in Excel after your tables have been extracted.

Image Extraction
You can quickly extract vector and bitmap images from a selected set of pages in your PDF document. Once extracted your images can be used in other documents. The same right-click functionality mentioned above makes image extraction easy.










Selecting the "Prompt for Options" check box opens the "Extract Images" dialog screen which provides you with options for saving your images in one of the following image formats: BMP, PNG, JPG, Tif or Gif.

It's that easy!

Headers and Footers in Free PDF to Word Services

Earlier this month we compared the conversion quality of Free PDF to Word and Zamzar. Although we touched on many features our service supports, one that we didn't explore was detecting and creating headers and footers when converting PDF files to Word.

In case you haven't used them before, headers and footers are located near the tops and bottoms of a document in Microsoft Word, typically outside the margins of a document. They are usually the same in an entire document, although it is possible to use different headers and footers for different sections. To create or modify them simply double click near the top or bottom margins of a document in Word.

The full extent of how to work with them is outside the scope of this blog post, but a Google search for headers and footers will likely get you the information you need.

Why Headers and Footers Matter

Surprisingly, few Word documents that customers send us make use of headers and footers (Apparently manually correcting each page number is fun for people. Or they're paid by the hour).

In short, headers and footers allow you to make a change and have it reflect in the rest of the document. Unlike styles (another way to manage large documents in Word), they are really easy to use and can quickly save you time when you create or modify a document.

A good example of this is when the company you work for is bought out by another company and you need to quickly update a document [pdf] with a new logo.

Once you've converted the document to Word using Free PDF to Word simply open the header and copy and paste the image into your favorite image editor:



Make the changes you need and then copy and paste the result back:



This change is reflected in other parts of the document. Given that this particular document is over 20 pages long, the time saved is very noticeable.

One nice side affect of detecting and creating headers and footers when converting from PDF to Word is that the result is smaller. In this case the result from Free PDF to Word is about 1/10th the size of the result from Zamzar (357KB vs 3900KB).

What Zamzar does with Headers and Footers

When converting a PDF file to Word, headers and footers are placed in the body of the document. In their converted result of the example document you can see that the entire background has been placed as one large flat image that cannot be separately easily:



Changing the header and footer in this case requires making the same change to almost all the pages in the document.

Not using headers and footers also makes it harder to add pages to existing documents. If you add a page break to a converted Word DOC from Zamzar the result will be a blank page:



Doing the same thing with the result from our Free PDF to Word service results in a page with the same header and footer as the page above it:



Page numbers in the rest of the document are also updated automatically with the result from Free PDF to Word. Unfortunately the result from Zamzar requires manually changing each page number if you add or remove pages.

Conclusion

In this case the result from Zamzar looks very nice. If you only have to correct individual lines of text their result is quite usable.

If however you need to make significant changes to the document their converted result requires large amounts of manual corrections. When this is the case using the result from Free PDF to Word will save you time and hassle. We encourage you to try this for yourself and let us know what you think.

Credits, fine print, etc.

Thanks to GlassFish for hosting the document we used as an example. Thanks to Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart of Sun for making the document in the first place. We are not affiliated with Sun, GlassFish or Oracle.

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Scan to Microsoft® Word

Solid PDF Tools offers powerful scanning features that allow users to scan multiple pages directly into one or more Word documents.

Scanning a paper document produces an image file. In order to create an editable Word document Solid PDF Tools needs to convert the images of letters into text characters. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature in Solid PDF Tools does this.

To create a Word document directly from paper, simply...

• Turn on your scanner
• Open Solid PDF Tools and click "Scan to Word".
• Select the "Scanning" options that are most suitable for your paper document.
• Set your "Output" options to Save, or Save and Open to open in Microsoft® Word.
• Click the "Scan to Word" button to start the scanning process.
• Preview your document and save.

Your Word document will open in Microsoft Word with all of it's original formatting and ready to edit.

The best candidate documents to scan back into Word are business documents that originated in Word in the first place – documents created by more complex Desktop Publishing products or that have lots of images are at the mercy of the limitations of Microsoft Word.