Wondershare PDFelement Review
PDFs can seem a bit boring, all you do is open them take a look then delete the file or perhaps save it if you might need it again later. Believe it or not, there’s a lot more you can do with PDF files, you just need the right software!
In this post, we’re going to be discussing Wondershare’s PDFelement program. It’s a PDF editor that goes way further in features than your standard PDF viewer and even has the added bonus of being available on both Mac and PC.
What is a PDF?
Let’s clear the air around PDFs first before we dive into how PDFelement can help you. So PDF stands for ‘Portable Document Format’ and although it would eventually become synonymous with Adobe, it was actually created by a few computer IT specialists a few years before Adobe came around and took it in.
In 2008 Adobe released the PDF filetype as an open standard – free to work with, and many other companies came rushing in with programs designed to work with PDFs and give them more functionality.
PDFs are a file format that attempt to capture all of the pieces of a physical printed document, that you can view, print, or forward along to other people.
This is where Wondershare comes in, they were originally founded in 2003 and released PDFelement around 2012. It’s been gathering steam since then as it gets more and more features!
What does PDFelement offer?
It’s not hard to find a free PDF viewer online, but the most they will offer is the ability to view the PDF and maybe if you’re lucky, add a digital signature.
PDFelement goes way further than that, offering features that standard PDF viewers can’t even dream of. Some of the best ones include:
- Text Editing: You can use PDFelement like you would a word processor, you can edit existing text and move text boxes around.
- OCR (optical character recognition): You can take a PDF and make it editable in over 20 different languages with OCR. Received a pdf you want to amend? No problem, scan it with OCR then edit it right in the same program.
- PDF Conversion: You can convert PDF files into Microsoft Word documents instead. There are a few additional handy features like turning several PDFs into one document or selecting only certain pages to convert.
- Forms: You can create fillable forms on PDFelement by simply moving text boxes around. You can even change the font and colors!
Historically, PDFs haven’t been nearly as flexible as other file types. You generally scanned a document, passed it around, and if you needed to, printed it out to have it signed. It was more like a picture than a document.
With those features, it essentially turns a PDF document into a regular text doc, sometimes literally! Instead of just viewing the PDFs now you get to interact with them and modify them.
This is especially handy if you deal with any kind of contracts. You don’t need to reject the contract and send it back to your client, just make the modifications yourself and then send the version 2.0 back!
Additional Features
While not as mind-blowing as the ability to edit PDFs, Wondershare PDFelement does have a few other useful features up their sleeve they list on their website :
- Add Password Protection: You can attach passwords to your PDFs, and use them to restrict opening the document, editing it, copying it or printing.
- Insert Your Signature: You can add your own digital signature to PDFs, made from your own handwriting.
- Merge and Split Files: You can combine several document types including PDFs and Microsoft Office files into one large PDF, or do the opposite and take a PDF but split it into smaller parts!
- Redact: A newer feature, it permanently removes any images or text you want from a PDF file, deleting them for good.
- Add Comments: Similar to some online document editors, you can annotate PDFs with PDFelement as well – you can add notes, highlight, underline text and more.
- Watermarking: are the files you’re sending classified? No problem, you can easily add your own watermark to the PDF files and mark them as your own! One word of warning though, getting rid of a watermark is not nearly as easy!
- Compression: If you’re concerned that a PDF might be a little too large to email over to a client, you can compress it down to a smaller size.
Although they’ve been around for quite a while now, PDFs are only getting more and more important as time goes by. Recently, many larger firms have started using PDF to gather digital signatures, so it’s a great investment in the future to pick up a product like PDFelement! For other reviews of other products you can visit Hot Rate site online, when you can see many different reviews of all kind of products.