Able2Extract Professional 14 Review

Able2Extract Professional 14 $149.95
https://www.investintech.com/

Able2Extract is a PDF editing and conversion tool. It can convert files between PDF and a variety of other formats including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, text, HTML and various image formats. Conversion can be done by loading documents one by one or in batch mode on a selected directory.

PDF on the left. Word on the right? Which is the original? Here the PDF eBook is the source document and I have used Able2Extract to create a Word document from it. If you click the image above to enlarge it you will see that the fully-editable Word document is very faithful to the PDF original, including column formatting and images. There are a few minor differences to text styles however.

Editing features include the ability to add and delete text or graphics, redacting (blacking out) selected text, and adding annotations. There is also built-in form support that lets you create editable forms with ‘fill-in’ fields. For an overview of the principal features see my review of a previous release of Able2Extract Professional 12. The main new features in this release are electronic and digital signing and improved “AI-powered” PDF to Excel conversion.

Here I am creating a new digital signature just by entering my name on the keyboard and letting Able2Extract generate a digital (cryptographic) signature image.

When I need to add my signature to a PDF form, I just drag the previously-generated digital image into place.

Electronic document signing lets you add a signature by drawing it on screen, typing it at the keyboard or adding a pre-prepared image.  Even though an electronic signature may not match your hand-written signature, it uses cryptographic techniques so that it can be verified for authenticity.

The other big new feature in this release are the so-called “AI-powered templates” for converting to and from Excel spreadsheets. According to Investintech, Able2Extract 14 has templates that “can be trained to automatically locate and convert PDF tables that match the table structure stored in a template, making tabular data extraction accurate and easy no matter how long the source document is or the position of tables in a PDF document.”

You can also load up PDF documents and auto-extract any tables to be converted to Excel. When this option is selected, all other text and image content of the PDF file is ignored and only the tabular data is extracted. Excel support goes beyond PDF conversion. Able2Extract lets you load up any of its supported formats (for example a Word document) and convert it direct to Excel.

Here I have a long PDF document that contains several tables. I want to extract the table into an Excel spreadsheet. The conversion option lets me extract the tables alone, ignoring the rest of the text.

This is the end result. My tables have been extracted into an Excel spreadsheet, read for me to edit them.

A common format for conversion is Microsoft Word. I tried out Able2Extract with some quite complicated eBooks with multiple columns, styles, box-outs, graphics tables and more. I have to say the conversion between Word and PDF was remarkably good. In my experience, there are occasionally some changes to font styles and  layout that crop up during conversion. But these are generally quite minor. On the whole, the conversion is fast and fairly accurate.

Overall, this is a very capable PDF conversion program. If you regularly need to convert documents to and from the supported formats or if you need to edit and sign PDF forms, this is about as easy as it gets.