Cogniview PDF2XL OCR

PDF2XL a versatile tool for small spreadsheet conversions

OCR is a bonus, but massive files will give the program trouble.

There are several things to like about Cogniview's PDF2XL OCR, including a simple interface, an idiot-proof walkthrough feature, some customization options and a built-in optical character recognition feature for scanned documents. But while it performed flawlessly on two easy tests, it flopped on the more difficult problems.

It failed on a difficult 1,500-page scanned document, choking after about 50 pages. There was no apparent way to break down the file into bite-size, digestible pieces save for tedious clicking and dragging, unacceptable when working with such large documents.

It also stumbled with a report marred by abundant white space and irregular cell depths. The program's simple layout editor -- which will look familiar to anyone who has used Excel's text-to-columns feature or Access's import wizard -- allows the user to tweak the conversion and fix misplaced rows and columns. But these changes are made page by page, making anything but short documents unacceptable if its automatic conversion settings need help.

For large documents, Cogniview just isn't flexible enough. Users can define tables manually or choose to automatically detect them, but there are no choices in between.

The inclusion of the OCR feature justifies this program's price ($129.97 for a full version), which is somewhat more costly than other converters. There is a free evaluation version, but that it limits users to converting just 10 pages of any given document at a time. That may be enough, though, for someone with a deadline and a smallish one-time project.