Able2Extract Professional Reviews - Pros & Cons, Ratings & more

ABBYY FineReader PDF

Jotform

PandaDoc

Adobe Acrobat Reader

Zamzar

Nitro Pro

Adobe Acrobat

All-in-one PDF solution for Windows, Mac, and Linux with perpetual licensing.

Able2Extract Professional

Linux

Windows

Asset Manager

Getting stuck and coming fatal error reports. Data not capturing when there are images frequently.

Owner

Easy to use, inexpensive. Great ability to extract data from PDF to Excel - better than Adobe and other products.

Head of Operations

I've used a lot of PDF conversion / editing tools over the years and Able2Extract is by far the best one. It's very easy to use and understand and their customer service is great.

Document Specialist 

Beautiful column separation, ability to save extraction templates.

R.N Nurse

My favorite feature of them all from Able2Extract Professional was the easy to use text searching feature which made pinpointing a certain word in a PDF document as easy as it can get.

Senior Accountant

The OCR and conversion of pdf to Excel or Word is great, and having a piece of stand-alone software is far superior to an online subscription.

Senior Analyst

Able2Extract is the best application in converting your pdf files into other type of documents. You can easily access it and the interface is just so easy to understand.

Director

It is a very good product for those who are in the field of Bookkeeping and Accounting as it is convert the most bank accounts.

finanical neutral in divorce matters

Sometimes the software guesses wrong about words so that review is required and sometimes formatting is off.

Good customer service and software experience.

I use it to convert pdf to Excel. It does a nice job converting reports to columnar form in Excel that allows for versatile sorting, subtotaling, etc.

consultant

In 12, one has more of an ability to apply the same table structure to non-consecutive pages, but it has a bug and does not work well. My worker actually went back to using 11, she says 12 is bad.

Virtual Assistant

I like how accurate it convert PDF file to Excel file with customization features.

We have found Able2 Extract of value to the business particularly with conversion of documents emailed to us and shared internally which can be easily converted for editing and inclusion in reports.

Office Manager

Easy to use and works so well. It saves us a lot of time.

So far , can complain about a thing. It is not expensive and easy to use.

Consultant 

Converting batch pdf files to excel for data scraping.

Self-employed

And the icing on the cake has always been their customer support. I email in a very specific question about how to do something, and get a detailed answer extremely rapidly.

Bluebeam Revu

Adobe XD

Signable

THE PROGRAM EXPORTED DATA TO EXCEL BETTER THAN ANY OTHER PROGRAM I HAVE EVER USED OR TRIED. THE LAYOUT AND THE NUMBERS TRANSFERRED WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS AS COMPARED TO THE OTHER MAJOR COMPETITORS' PDF PROGRAMS, WHICH DISTORTED THE TEXT OR COMBINED TEXT AND NUMBERS TOGETHER CREATING LONGER REVIEW AND FIX TIME.

INCREDIBLY ACCURATE

It was difficult to get customer service to reply to my emails.  And they stated that they would like the opportunity to fix the problem before I get a refund, however, I have yet to hear anything back from them and their engineers, and it has been over a week since my last communication with them. 

Not for DWG use

Just what we needed!

Great PDF to Excel Converter

Excellent Piece of kit

Able2Extract has boosted my effectiveness in producing documents and presentations for clients and prospects.

Happy End User

Over the years I use the pdf to word or excel programs.  It saves time, rather than retyping or getting a word or excel original.  I also create fillable pdf forms, rather than handwriting in the information.  

Long time and happy user

Great product

I am getting impatient waiting for someone to get back to me.

I am waiting for Customer Service to get back to me

Stable and reliable 

PDF Converter

Best pdf to excel conversion I've found

I have a long standing exposure to this software. I consider it an essential part of my toolbox. I recognize that the company innovates well across its development and custumer service is sound. 

My thoughts

Review

Over all, this is a good software that I continue to use. However, I feel like it's moving away from data extraction and becoming more concerned with PDF annotation. While I don't mind, I certainly haven't noticed much change in data extraction between the versions I've used. I feel like 14 was the best version. The more recent versions have been slower or have put out more "garbage" data. 

Good with room for improvement

Overall, I have been able to open pdfs and convert them to Word. That's it. I will continue to search for another software, since Adobe pretty much takes over the computer and all its apps and thus is not an option, before my renewal date.

Opens and converts pdfs fine, text fill is worthless

Thanks for your feedback, Audrey! If you are still having trouble using the text editing and form filling functionalities in Able2Extract, our support agents will be more than happy to provide you with a detailed step-by-step tutorial on the subject. The process is different for interactive and non-interactive PDF forms. Additional info can be found in our knowledge base and Help file that is available for download. 

Rest assured, the editing tools work as intended: you can customize the font style and size, pinpoint the exact location of text using the X and Y coordinate lines, move text boxes around for more accurate placement, etc., with potential limitations due to various specific PDF document properties (structural elements, layers, rich media, etc.). 

Regarding premuim support, it is not required, but offers many benefits like priority handling, free access to future major and minor updates, volume discounts and more. 

I was so glad when I found this software! (It's been several years now.) And the icing on the cake has always been their customer support. I email in a very specific question about how to do something, and get a detailed answer extremely rapidly.

Great product, excellent support

Hi Elizabeth - We have the OCR option for German you can turn on. By setting the OCR engine to look specifically for German-language characters and nothing else, you should be able to pull out good, or even better, conversion results. You can do this by having only "German" selected as your language option, which can be found in the Conversion Options dialog (OCR/R2V tab). If you have the latest version. Please give that a try. It should help. 

If you need assistance, though, please get in touch and we can guide you. Like you, we're also looking forward to the next improvements on our OCR engine. Thanks for sharing your Able2Extract user experience with us!

Great product. Easy to use.

For any conversions that don't come out accurately, get in touch with us at techsupport@investintech.com. Our developers can figure out the right settings and options to ensure the results are as accurate as they can possibly get. 

Also, you should check out the latest version of Able2Extract Professional interface! We recommend downloading a free trial to see how it's improved since then. It now has a modern tabbed interface, support for 3 different languages, a start page to quickly access recent files and customization options, a handy side panel, dark & light themes, and instant access to quick how-to tutorials. If you have an older version, you can easily upgrade at a fraction of the full version cost. Hope you give it a shot!

We use this software to program our tax software.

A Lifesaver

Hey Nancy -You make a great point about moving your version to different computers. We do have the option to purchase a CD for the software. However, please check with customer support first to see if we have your version available. 

Moreover and even better, is that we can always get you set up with the installation link for your version. If you bookmark it or save it somewhere, you can always access your version instantly. 

Chat with us online, and it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to get that to you when you need it. Thanks for bringing that up!

This is a very cost effective product to change different file types to other file types. Super easy to go from pdf to excel which is what we mainly use it for.

My favorite product!

Thanks, Adam! Happy to hear that Able2Extract is still serving you well after all these years. That is exactly the type of Excel-PDF user expereince we hope to provide our users. Looking forward to keeping you on as an Able2Extract user for another 10! 

With this upgrade and an understanding of its capabilities—especially its very strong OCR engine—I had hoped to set it up as an easy way to process PDFs. If there were an easy way to have the software watch a folder, automatically run OCR and save the results, this program would be worth its weight in gold. But alas, even when coupled with an app like Hazel or Keyboard Maestro, the software doesn't play well with others. It's great software within its narrow use case, but there is so much more possibility there.

Drop Dead Conversions from PDF to Excel and Back

Thank you for your comments and support! Your feedback about the PDF to Excel and OCR capabilities is great to hear.

To address your first comment, we'd like to point out that Able2Extract does convert to other formats beyond MS Office: HTML, AutoCAD, image formats (jpg, bmp, tif, gif, png), OpenOffice, Text, CSV,  etc. Hopefully, those options provide enough variety for any need you may have. 

With regards to the watch folder capability you mention, we do have server products that provide that functionality for automated conversion. Thus, if you're interested in how that works, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our team with any questions. 

Version 12 is just another great release of a very strong utility. This has been my go-to utility for extracting data from PDFs to load into SQL databases and Excel sheets. I've been a user since 2006 and I can not imagine going back to OCR and manual correction.

Indespensible Utility

Thanks for the kind and helpful feedback, Peter! 

With each new version we try to improve automatic conversion results by expanding the range of different kinds of PDF document tables that would give good results. Our algorithm is constructed to work with as many files as possible, and unfortunately, in some cases, this can have a negative effect on some other specific files. 

If you¿d like to send us the file you have issues with, we can include that in our testing in an effort to correct the problem. Cheers!

We respond to a lot of Tenders that include lots of forms and tables. Able2 Extract enables us to extract these into word or excel, saving a lot of time

Able2Extract Professional 12 Review 

Hi Greg -- Thanks for sharing your user experience with us. To address your issues with scanned documents, you may want to try forcing the conversion by turning the OCR engine on. Go to the Edit menu > OCR Options> click on the "Perform Image-Based Conversion (OCR)" option.  Or if what you have is a scanned PDF with a mixture of both digitally generated and scanned/image elements, you can try turning the OCR off by selecting the "No Image-Based Conversion (OCR)" option. In both cases, this can help improve and return better conversion results. You can find more details on this from our Help topic: https://www.investintech.com/support/helpfiles/desktop/a2epro/html/Edit-OCROptions.htm I hope that helps. If the issue with scanned conversions still continue, though, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at techsupport@investintech.com with your file and we can take a closer look for you. 

It saves one from having to hand enter data.  

I love this software, but it could easily be improved greatly

Carl, we¿re sorry to hear you aren¿t satisfied with this version. 

You make a valid point. We only had one new PDF to Excel feature (Named Table Structures) in version 12. We used this version update to focus primarily on improving PDF editing capabilities and there are only so many updates we can realistically implement within each version. However, thank you  for your continued input and feedback on Able2Extract¿s PDF to Excel conversion :) We do value your suggestions and have already sent them to our developers. 

Lastly, if you can connect with our tech support team on what exact bugs you¿re experiencing with the table structures, we can work to help resolve that issue for you. 

Swiss army knife software

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Able2Extract. We're sorry to hear you're having difficulties with the Printer driver. 

With the Able2Extract Professional Printer, please try and uninstall Able2Extract from your computer. When that's done, check the Devices and Printers section on your computer to see if the Able2Extract Printer is removed. If not, right click on the printer and select the "Remove device" option. Then delete the Able2Extract folder and all of its contents from your computer's Program Files folder. Finally, reboot the system and re-install the software.

Operations Manager

Adam:                                                  My name is Adam and I'm the director of operations for a life insurance advisory firm for high net worth and ultra high net worth clients. And I would rate Able2Extract Professional a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5 for its ability to enable us to take data from documents such as PDFs and very easily move them to Excel documents, which we need for client presentations.
                                                       We have illustrations for our clients that come in PDF format. What Able2Extract allows us to do is take those PDF documents and translate them to Excel documents, so that we can create a customized presentation for our clients. And this allows us to design and formulate a plan for each one of our clients that is unique to them and be able to present it to them in a way that is easy for them to read and understand and Able2Extract allows us to take that data and be able to do that with those customized spreadsheets.
                                                       The thing that I like most about Able2Extract is its ability to allow me to quickly and efficiently move data from PDF to Excel. Before we had the product, we were doing it manually, so we were typing in data from PDFs directly into Excel, which was very time consuming, labor intensive. But now with Able2Extract, we're able to do it with just a few clicks, and that takes our presentation time down drastically, which enables us to create more presentations and work with more clients due to the time that we save using the system.
                                                       In all honesty, there's really not much I dislike about the system. Full disclosure, we use it very simply to move data from PDF to Excel. So I think maybe we don't use it enough, but the value that it brings for us is great, and I wouldn't use another product if I had the opportunity.

Able2Extract Professional Reviews

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Pros and cons

145 reviews