Those numbers needed to be entered into a tax return. I recently received a PDF file with financial information for a charity. I imagine there would be more than a few people who immediately think, “But why would you ever want to convert a PDF into a Word or Excel file?” Ah, my friend, here is a first hand example: Converting PDFs to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint Files One of the most impressive features is the way PDF Expert 3 can get rid of scanned wrinkles in your receipts, making what looks like a near-perfect PDF with a nice white background. PDF Expert 3 also introduces some new scanning enhancement features for making your digital scans easier to view and work with. OCR support in PDF Expert is one of those features that may be worth the price of admission all on its own. Now, all those features are combined into one app and a simple phone camera. I remember back in my university days setting up a rig and a few lights to take photos of every single page in my textbooks to allow for digital study. This is especially handy for scanned receipts you intend to submit at tax time or for physical books you’ve scanned in for research. Once OCR is applied to the PDF, you can search for individual words in that PDF and you can select and highlight the text found in that PDF. PDF Expert 3 for Mac brings OCR to PDFs with images (rather than text).

Where the old physical library required folders, bookmarks, and tedious searching, an OCR-digital world allows for a quick search query to highlight the exact document you’re looking for. Optical Character Recognition is that core, fundamental requirement to taking a former physical library of paperwork into the digital world. OCR Support and New Scanning Features for Those Pesky Receipts Fortunately, if your preferences align with mine, you can still open new PDFs in a new window rather than a new tab in PDF Expert’s preferences. The only major difference between PDF Expert on iPad’s UI and the UI on the Mac is the positioning of open PDF tabs - on the Mac, these are positioned top left, while the iPad has them positioned below the toolset toolbar. For those who prefer dark modes though, this will be a welcome feature. Since many PDFs are generally white, I find the contrast between a dark UI and a bright PDF to be a bit jarring. PDF Expert 3 gains a dark mode on the Mac, bringing it in line with the rest of macOS’s core features. This is very reminiscent of PDF Expert on the iPad, as are all the little tool glyphs and other points of interest. PDF Expert’s different “modules” (Annotate, Edit, Scan & OCR, and Export) are now all aligned in the center of the app’s main view, with each module’s toolset in a toolbar positioned below. You’d be forgiven if you thought PDF Expert on the iPad fully came to the Mac - PDF Expert 3 for Mac owes a lot of its new visual design to iOS. PDF Expert on the iPad Visually Comes to the Mac Here’s a quick first look at PDF Expert 3’s major new features and how the team is nicely combining the best PDF features from PDF Expert on the iPad with PDF Expert on the Mac. PDF Expert recently received a major update to version 3, bringing with it a new design, OCR support, and new ways to export PDFs. Today, PDF Expert is likely the best option for power PDF users. Lots has changed since then, though - PDF Expert didn’t even make the top of our contenders list. Way, way back, we named PDFpen for Mac the best PDF app for when Preview didn’t fit the bill. Apple’s Preview PDF app does a good job for most PDF uses, offering catch-all support, a nice array of annotation tools, strong searching features, and reasonably good export and resizing features.īut for those who need more PDF features - such as the ability to edit a PDF, to apply OCR, to import or export from/to Word or Excel file formats, or to create a table of contents within the PDF - you’ll have to go looking for something more powerful than Preview.

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