The Portable Document Format is very convenient and used everywhere, but also often frustrating. Surely you can remember staring at important information being able to copy or edit it. Thankfully, a quick search on Google will point you to countless online tools that help convert PDF files to other formats. For example, once your document is converted to Word or Excel, you can easily edit it or import it into your software… right? Well, the PDF conversion results are not always satisfying. In fact, you will likely run into issues. In this article, I’m going to discuss 5 challenges of using a free PDF converter and an alternative you might want to try.
1. Usage limitations
Credit where credit is due: if you have one or two PDF documents to convert, most free converters will do the job just fine.
That being said, if you have multiple PDFs, you may run into usage limitations. For example, you are only allowed to convert a few documents per hour or per day. Or you can only convert one file at a time, which means you’ll have to spend a lot of time uploading your documents one by one.
So if your day-to-day responsibilities include processing batches of PDF documents and inputting data within them into a database, your average free PDF converter is not exactly cut out for the job.
And while upgrading to a paid plan may remove these limitations, there’s a chance you will run into the second challenge, that is…
2. You can’t customize the data extraction process
The way most free converters work is that they take the entire PDF file and extract its contents into the format you choose. So you can’t really choose which data fields to exclude, or how your extracted data should be structured. This means you will probably have to spend extra time deleting unwanted data and organizing the rest of your data.
And that’s not all: sometimes, the converter will fail to recognize a character, like a letter specific to a European language, so — you can guess it — manual editing is required.
What would be a lot more efficient is using a PDf converter that allows you to select the specific data fields you want extracted and shows a preview of what the results will be like, so you can further customize the conversion process and get clean data. This way, you’d be able to convert multiple PDFs at the same time and get the same quality of data extraction with no extra editing required.
3. Converting scanned documents
Some free PDF converters work better with native documents (where data is in digital format). If you want to process PDFs that are scans of paper documents, then you need to look for a converter that has an OCR engine. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and is the technology that can identify and extract data from scanned documents.
You can easily find a lot of image-to-text tools online, but they may come with the limitations I’ve just explained above: no batch conversion, subpar data extraction, etc. Plus, juggling between several converters is not very convenient. What would be ideal, though, is using one tool that can extract data from both native and scanned PDFs.
4. No integrations with your cloud stack
Most free PDF converters offer many conversion options: PDF to Word, PDF to Excel, PDF to CSV, PDF to JPG, etc. What they don’t offer is the possibility to send your processed documents to an app in your cloud stack. So you end up downloading a bunch of files that you have to manually upload into your software, if that is doable at all.
To illustrate, let’s say you receive purchase orders in native PDF format and you need to move the order information into your database on QuickBooks. Converting these PDFs to Word, for instance, wouldn’t be of much use because you would still need to copy and paste data manually from Word into your database. That means spending several hours a week and tedious data entry and risking making mistakes.
What you really need in this case is a tool that converts your PDFs to machine-readable data which is then sent to QuickBooks via an integration. Just imagine how much time and effort you can save.
So what’s the alternative?
Good question… assuming you have to process PDFs every day, then you need a PDF converter that allows you to:
- Convert PDFs in batches
- Customize the data extraction process however you like
- Extract data from scanned documents
- Export your extracted data to a cloud app of your choice
The good news is that there is an online tool that allows you to do this and more. It’s called Docparser and it’s a web-based solution for automating data capture. You can use it to extract information from your PDFs and either download it or export it to a cloud app. Beyond converting PDFs, Docparser lets you automate your document-based workflows which massively improves your productivity. If you’re interested, read this blog post to learn how you can create your custom free PDF converter with Docparser.
