Though it’s far from obvious when you visit Wondershare’s website, there are Standard and Pro versions of PDFelement, and many people will find the cheaper Standard version included everything they need. Speaking of which, there are various options: you can subscribe for six months, a year or buy a perpetual license, which is good value if you know you’ll be editing PDFs for more than a year.
There’s a free trial which adds a watermark to your documents, and it will only convert 5 pages of a document longer than 10 pages, so it’s not an alternative to paying. Plus, you can select and move images around at will, delete elements and import new images.Īs you’d expect from a paid-for product, it allows you to sign and protect documents as well as create forms. Unlike some PDF editors, which force you to cover existing text (like using Tippex) and then type over the top, PDFelement allows you to select and modify text just as you can in Word and is pretty good at recognising the original font that was used. On unprotected documents you can click the ‘Edit text’ button and do exactly that. We found this worked well, except for large Excel sheets since there’s no option to select just a portion of the sheet you want to import: it’s all or nothing. You can create a PDF from scratch, but can also import a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. PDFelement Pro has evolved over the past couple of years and has a slick interface that’s intuitive and the tools are easy to use. Of course the major difference here is that you buy Power PDF outright, and this makes it a lot cheaper than Acrobat DC unless you only need to edit PDFs very occasionally, in which case you could start and stop an Acrobat subscription.īut for small businesses that deal with PDFs regularly, it’s a great choice. That may not be an issue for you, but it’s worth noting. There are versions for Windows and macOS, but not for phones or tablets. With Advanced you can redact information, apply Bates numbering to pages, export to various cloud storage services and have multiple people working on the same document at the same time, though this only works if they’re on the same local network, which somewhat limits its usefulness.
It will also make scanned documents searchable using OCR. You can also edit text within PDFs, change images, annotate and more. Standard has the core features most people need, such as creating PDFs from various formats and combining multiple files into a single PDF. There are again two versions: Power PDF Standard and Power PDF Advanced. And that means you will be able to get up and running with it very quickly. Previously distributed under the Nuance brand, Kofax Power PDF is intuitive and easy to use, especially if you’re familiar with Microsoft Office.