I’m pleased to announce that Nitro PDF Professional 6.01 is available immediately. All current 6.0 users can download the update now and those still considering Nitro Pro can grab the free 14-day trial. The release has addressed some bugs and improved the performance, but most exciting of all is the all-new PDF to Excel conversion feature addition.
If you’ve been following our blog for a while and enjoying our free family of products, you may well have already tried our PDF to Excel technology via our free online service. (The service has become extraordinarily popular in just a few months’ existence.) Both the free service and Nitro PDF Professional 6.01 use the same underlying conversion engine, technology that’s expert at making sense out of particularly complex content in PDF files. Converting table-based content out of PDF files is one of the toughest things to do and the technology behind our PDF-to-Excel engine is designed specifically to handle it.
Desktop PDF-to-Excel conversion
So what are the key differences between the free service and desktop version, you may ask? In a nutshell, conversion speed and control. Working straight from your computer you can convert individual pages, entire documents, or entire collections, in the one process — in a fraction of the time. There’s no manual uploading and waiting to receive your converted file.
But, really, it’s up to you and how you work, some of you might only very occasionally want to work with PDF files and find that our free services are adequate, while the rest of you might find yourself working with PDF files more and more. If the latter is your case, then a complete desktop PDF solution like Nitro PDF Professional might start making a lot more sense.
Comparing our PDF-to-Excel technology
There are a range of PDF-to-Excel tools out there of vary quality and price, but here’s the key questions I’d ask myself when trying to choose the right one for your work:
- Does the converter do fully-automated processing? Most PDF-to-Excel tools are unable to automatically scan PDF files, detect and then extract just table content — meaning you have to manually select each table to extract them or alternatively you receive an Excel file containing the entire contents of the PDF, which you must sift through to (hopefully) find your tables. Nitro PDF Professional automates the whole process.
- Does the converter retain the look and feel of tables? Most PDF-to-Excel converters don’t even attempt to retain the look of tables. Nitro PDF Professional gets right into it. The example below shows you the kinds of formatting we can handle, including fonts sizes and styles, borders, cell colors and row and column spacing.
Really seeing is believing. We encourage you to try out a bunch of PDF-to-Excel converters and see how well ours compares.
