I usually produce reports as PDF files – its great as it retains the exact formatting, including pagination and special fonts. Levels of security can also be embedded. However, I sometimes need to convert a PDF file to be used on a word processor like Microsoft Office.
There are a number of free on-line tools, but most of them give a very manged interpretation of the PDF document. One stands out in terms of accuracy – PDFtoWord
You simply browse for the PDF file you want to convert and the web-page uploads it, converts it to your choice of PDF or RFT and emails it back to you. Easy.
I uploaded a complex PDF document with tables and charts made by Excel and the returned doc and rtf files (around 1 Mb) were perfect images of the original PDF file.
The complexity meant that the conversion took a while – probably an hour or so, but tables came back with the exact look of the original and very “clean”.
Charts came back, not as charts, but a complex assemblage of text boxes that fitted together to make the chart, though to me I would rather they were embedded graphics, like would have occurred in the original. I guess I could do a screen grab from either the original PDF or the converted file (Control/Print Screen) and then paste screen for trimming into a fast graphics editor like IrfanView for cropping.
There is also a sister product PDFtoExcel.
