Soda PDF vs Able2Extract Professional Comparison

Before I started using InDesign, I had used this free online software to merge large PDF files into a booklet for our Magazine company. It is very fast to compile your data and create professional looking booklets absolutely free. Also, you can use this online without the need to download software.

Honestly, I do not have any real complaints. You can download this software if you choose and use it as an overall PDF reader and editor.

It's easy to use with little to no formal training -- very intuitive. I like that it converts documents TO PDF, PDF to MSWord or other types of files, and lets me upload a document for PDF filler access. I think forms are more professional when they're typed instead of being handwritten -- cleaner and neater for sure! We use SODA to upload forms sent to us, then fill in via the PDF filler. I love how easy SODA is to use via Mac/PC, tablets, and phones. Even when my staff and I are outside the office -- at home or on the road -- we can access SODA to ensure our work continues seamlessly. PDFs created can be saved to the Cloud, Desktop, or even e-mailed. I love this software/app!

My only small complaint is that it can be hard to locate a file once it's complete. That's likely on me instead of SODA. We downloaded the software/app, and have been learning as we go. Perhaps some training on our part would make archiving easier.

It's features of pdf optimisation, pdf conversion and pdf editing helps effectively

Pricing can be made little more comfortable

We mostly use this for converting PDF's to DWG format. The software is intuitive to use and conversion is fast

PDF to CAD could be more accurate with linework. Does not capture the OCR layer in PDF. Does not do well creating text with CAD PDF files.

Thanks for sharing your comments, David! As to your issue, from what you describe, it seems like you¿re dealing with a scanned PDF document. When working with native (electronic) PDFs, Able2Extract is designed to convert text as text and lines as lines (as they are in the source PDF file). However, scanned or image-based PDFs are simply images that have no information embedded in them. So, this is why our application converts "text" from such files into set of lines, instead of a proper text (and this is the issue you¿ve been experiencing, if we understood you correctly). If you can send in a sample file to us at techsupport@investintech.com, we can take a closer look.

Ease of use. Ongoing improvements. Customer Service.

Conversions from pdf to Windows and PPT is excellent. Conversion from pdf to Excel is lacking

Thanks for dropping in with that feedback, Dan. If you're having issues with a specific PDF to Excel conversion, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us. Send in an email with the file and a description of your conversion issue to techsupport@investintech.com, if you can. We can get our developers to take a look at it, and see how we can help you get the most out of the PDF to Excel feature. Cheers!

I like the software for its ease of use. The interface is simple and straightforward. As a person who gets a lot of PDF reports that need to be analysed, Able2Extract allowed me the get the data into Excel sheets.

Some PDF files do not convert to Excel cleanly. Information from two columns are entered in one cell. I then have to correct the data manually. It is not often enough to make me look for something else but can be irksome when I am in a hurry.

With the Custom PDF to Excel feature you can avoid having to correct the data manually. From what you describe in your particular case, you would first set up your table structure (rows and columns) as usual using the Custom PDF to Excel mode. Then select the "Split only between words" option from the drop down list in the Columns section from the right hand panel. You can find a walkthrough here: https://www.investintech.com/resources/blog/archives/7993-pdf-to-excel-fix-misplaced-column-content.html In addition, you can save and load Custom Excel templates (via File menu) to instantly set up the same table structure for conversion if you deal with similarly formatted reports often. We hope that helps! Feel free to get in touch with any questions.

Love that you can bring the document into several different types of files.

Newer versions are updated with even more features.

I use the convert from pdf to excel the most. This newest version works extremely well. the software launches easily

Sometimes i have to adjust the vertical lines that separate the pdf into columns but its very good after that

Thanks for sharing, Dave! If you ever have any questions about making adjustments to your table structures and vertical lines, feel free to get in touch with us.

This software is superb, exporting to many useful formats, very easy and highly accurate

Nothing so far, other PDF extractors have failed too often

Thanks, Jon!

The conversion ability from PDF to other formats

You need to learn the curve to master the product

Speed and comprehensive approach to any PDF documents.

Why does it always ask to save an office documents before it's openned in MS Office.

The ability to customize what and how you extract from PDF's

Sometimes columns are combined that shouldn't be.

Thanks! We'll pass this feedback over to our developers. If you have table samples on which that column merging consistently occurs, please send that to techsupport@investintech.com and they can take a look.

Conversion of pdf documents to Excel in order work with them.

Conversion does not always line up the columns properly.

I can change PDF to Excel and then run it in a program

nothing. I do not have anything that I can think of.

Best conversion quality from PDF to Excel. Always get the tables and formats right.

Large PDFs are slow to load and change between pages.

I use this mostly for converting pdf documents to excel - pricing sheets, construction specs, etc.

It can be a little cumbersome at times, but that's the price of the extensive functionality.

Pdf to dfx transition. Dfx is an extension used by modelers to comunicate with autocad layouts.

We miss an option to rotate the resulted dxf file according to modeling needs (ie, to straighten the results parallel to the north).

Able2Extract 12 is easy to use, straight-forward to access and just works.

Table handling could be a little better at times - but it's still lightyears ahead of the competition.

Thanks for the comments, Andrew. If you have any specific comments on where we can clean up the table handling a bit, please do let us know via our Request A Feature form: https://www.investintech.com/products/desktop/request/ We'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on that.

It has OCR, and its easy to use. Extracting useful info from pdf and making tables got easy

Sometimes does not align table rows properly, i have to use manual selection of tables.

Thanks for the comments, Zoran! Yes, the table selection in the custom Excel conversion feature will always give you the opportunity to fix those misalignments, so you don't have to re-convert and clean the rows post-conversion. We're glad you'r finding the software helpful. Cheers!

gets data from a PDF to an excel so it can be used to manage and manipulate INFO

data was usually in excel but many times it was everywhere but it was usable / easy to pull it together from the everywhere spots.

Given a good PDF, the ability to be consistent about how it is treated rather than picking up minor inconsistencies

Inability to be trained or learn. I would like to see more intelligent interactive pre-OCR which allows you to select the elements you want

Thanks for the suggestion and comments, Adrian. We'll pass that OCR feedback on to our developers. They'd be interested in hearing that. Cheers!

Ease of use in creating new documents from PDFs

Sometimes the software guesses wrong about words so that review is required and sometimes formatting is off. Having a very clean PDF helps

Agreed, having a clean PDF does help. The quality of any PDF conversion relies on what you have in the original document, especially when you¿re dealing with scanned PDFs. However, we¿re always making improvements to the conversion algorithm. So, if you¿re consistently having issues with certain types of content in a PDF (lettering, format, font, etc.), please send in a sample to techsupport@investintech.com. Our developers would be interested in taking a look. Thanks for sharing your experience with Able2Extract.

easy to convert pdf's to any format and editing and can allow to modify any pdf and create a word document.

program is hard to read on high resolution displays. So it is ok on a 1920x1080 display , but on a 4k display you need good eyes

Thanks for sharing, Tony. Regarding the display resolution you mentioned, for ideal vieiwng, Able2Extract is best when on 1366 (Width) x 768 (Height) screens across all platforms. You will need a higher resolution screen on Windows and Linux machines if your OS scaling is more than 100%. On Mac systems, you can also view the software on 1280 (Width) x 800 (Height) non-Retina screen resolution or 2560 (Width) x 1600 (Height) Retina screen resolution. Hopefully the above specs help!

By far, this is the easiest way to extract text and images from a PDF or image. It's fast and accurate.

Version 17 does not work on my Ubuntu computer, however version 16 is more than adequate.

It's fast and saves me a lot of time when converting data to Excel. It has not problems with PDF forms when converting

Sometimes the coloumn layout gets warped a bit. The fonts don't always come through as per original document

Thanks for your input, Eben! With regards to the font conversions, this is most often the case where the font in the PDF file is embedded. Embedded fonts cannot be perfectly extracted since most embedded font formats used in PDF aren't recognized by Excel and also because using such fonts could be considered a copyright issue due to their proprietary nature. As such, Excel (including Word) will...

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This was an easy program to download and convert my document into a pdf for editing. Fast, simple and to the point!

I didn't have any issues with the software.

Great to hear everything went perfectly for you. We always aim to put the user experience first! Thanks, Laurie :)

The ability to extract data from PDFs, into readily useable spreadsheets or Word documents - an enormous benefit.

Nothing comes to mind - occasionally tables with more complex formatting do not get extracted exactly, but it is usually easy to fix the problem.