Once the cornerstone of digital design, PDF files are now a standard paper-surogate used across the world to simplify business invoice and form workflows. There’s just one catch: PDF readers are freely available. But full featured PDF solutions that would let people maximize the value of their PDFs are another matter.
For many SMB users, the big PDF authoring packages are too complex and too expensive — a publishing sledgehammer to crack a document walnut. What they need are simple, affordable tools to automate invoice and form creation, and eliminate time-consuming and error-prone manual data entry. Now there’s a simple, business-focused PDF alternative: PDFelement 6 Professional with breakthrough form technologies and editing software so accurate you can revise practically any document like Microsoft Word.
A smarter way to edit Lets start with its editing tools. If you’ve ever had to work with PDFs, you’ll know that making anything more than the most minor edit is a pain. Unless you’re happy to edit line-by-line, the text not reflowing automatically to reflect your changes, you’ll have to go back to the authoring package to make even simple amendments. You might even have to send your edits back to a designer.
With PDFelement 6 that’s no longer necessary. Text on the page is separated intelligently into discreet text boxes, where you can add, delete or edit text in much the same way as you would in Microsoft Word. Click inside a paragraph and delete a phrase and the rest of the text in the box will reflow to match. If you want to change a font, a point-size or even a colour there’s no need to backtrack to an authoring package; you can do it all from within PDFelement 6 in an instant. This goes an awfully long way towards taking the pain out of editing and finalising PDFs.
What’s more, PDFelement 6 goes further. You can insert images, adjust the text in a infographic or adjust the size of an illustration. You can add a header or a footer, not to mention a background image or colour tint. And at the larger, structural level, PDFelement 6 makes short work of deleting pages from a PDF, splitting PDFs or even extracting individual pages to make a new PDF. The intuitive, Microsoft Office-style interface makes it easy.
New workflows Yet there’s more to PDFelement 6 than just viewing and editing PDFs; it also has a range of tools that transform how you can use PDF within your workflows. Take the conversion features, for example. PDFelement 6 can not only convert images, HTML and text files into PDFs, but also convert PDFs into fully-editable Pages, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, not to mention HTML, RTF or ePub files. Existing PDFs or scanned documents can become the basis of a new Word document or even a PowerPoint presentation, with PDFelement’s built-in OCR converting the text on the page into text you can copy, paste, edit and reformat to your heart’s content.
That’s impressive enough, but then we come to PDFelement’s handling of forms. Scan one of your existing paper forms as a PDF then open it in PDFelement. Now click the Form Field Recognition button and the software goes to work, automatically recognising the fields you would normally fill in by hand and turning them into editable text fields to be filled in as part of a digital form. You can also insert dropdowns, check boxes, radio buttons and list boxes, then save a new PDF out to be completed and signed digitally. Within hours you could replace your old, inefficient, paper-based processes with digital workflows that get you the information you need faster, in a format you can store, share and analyse with ease.
Not that your old paper forms are wasted. Scan them in as PDFs and you can run batch operations on them, extracting the data from each into a .CSV file you can import directly into Excel or the spreadsheet or database of your choice. This feature, unique at this price level, allows years of records to be turned into fully-editable data, ready for further analysis and storage. In fact, any documents you have can be processed in batches, becoming Pages, Word or Excel files you can edit, store and search through. Valuable information your business could use could be released from your old filing cabinets. Who knows what impact that might have?
Using the full power of PDF These are the kind of features that enable businesses of any size to optimise their working processes and make more use of the valuable data that lies dormant in their old documents. Combine them with PDFelement’s powerful editing and conversion features and you can make PDFs work for you. Best of all, these capabilities come with a price tag that small businesses and individual users can afford, not a hefty charge or annual subscription covering a bunch of publishing features you’ll never use. Why not try it for yourself? There’s a free Mac trial download available plus more information on PDFelement’s features available here. Give it a go and discover what PDFelement 6 could do for you and your business.