14 DAY TRIAL // Simpo PDF to Word does exactly what the name suggests: converts Portable Document Format files to Microsoft’s DOC format. Plain text is also an alternative in the application if you want to lose all formatting and pictures.
Copy/paste is useful for a small portion of text, but when you have documents as large as 50 pages (or more) this procedure is no longer a feasible solution. An instrument that can automatically parse the pages, extract the content and save it as DOC as close to the original PDF file as possible seems like an alternative.
Simpo PDF to Word aims to give you a hand in this sense and allow you to easily get to the results you want. The price for the application is $29.95, but you can get a taste of what it can do before shelling your money. Evaluation limitations impose a two-page limit for conversion and you will have to deal with a nag screen during the trial.
Installation procedure does not take too long to complete and it does not bring anything else but Simpo PDF to Word on board of your system. The application is no complicated thing, and a look at the interface should assure you of this fact.
The only settings you can do are defining the output format (Microsoft Office Word 97-2003 DOC or TXT), its storage path and the pages you want to be converted. As simple as the application is, it does not lack a configuration panel.
The options available here allow you to change the interface language, enable the program to show a tooltip when encrypted PDFs are added (protected by password) and set the frequency for automatically checking for updates.
Drag and drop is not supported by the program, so the only way to add the PDFs you want to convert is to browse for them from the application. This a bit of an inconvenient since most of the users would prefer the more comfortable alternative.
Performance-wise Simpo PDF to Word does not suck too much of your system’s resources. During our tests on PDFs a few hundred pages large CPU peaked at 63% (with an average of 50%) while RAM upped to 160MB (with an average of 150MB).
More important than resource usage are the results. Unfortunately Simpo PDF to Word is not perfect, despite the price that tends to contradict at the beginning. It did a great job when mainly text was involved. But when we threw in some tables and graphics, it failed to add them accurately to DOC.
In some cases text would be overlaid and some elements of the table would even miss from the output document. To make a long story short, Simpo PDF to Word is a good helper as long as your Adobe text documents are not complicated in structure.
We also tried Simpo PDF to Word’s skills with password-protected documents. It ran its routine unhindered with documents protected by owner password, but in the case of those safeguarded by user password the countersign was required in order to start the conversion.
As soon as all the documents have been turned to either DOC or TXT, the application shows a notification. Also, all the results can be accessed straight from the application window immediately after the conversion completes by clicking on the link under “Status” column.
Simpo PDF to Word is a simple program, but this does not justify the lack of an option to pause the processing of the documents or even interrupt it. Another feature the application falls short of is estimated time of completion either for the current job or the entire task altogether.
On the upside, in the registered version of the program you can select the pages you want to convert. You can define either multiple individual pages or an interval; all these included in a single job.
The duration for converting into Word documents depends on the amount of elements included in the original PDF. If the program has to deal with lots of images and tables and formatting then the operation will take longer to complete. Turning the document to TXT requires little time; in our case, a document of almost 1000 pages was saved as TXT in less than 10 seconds.
You can select the pages the program should convert. Defining an interval is also possible. The price and the advantages offered by the program do not match. You can’t rely on it doing a (close to) great job in every situation.
The Good
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This article is also available in Spanish: Convierte archivos PDF en el formato de Office Word
