Recosoft’s PDF2Office 5 ($70–$129) converts PDFs into fully editable Microsoft Excel, Word and PowerPoint formats, maintaining the original layout and graphics, including tables, headers and footers, endnotes and footnotes, columns and sections. It can also extract text or graphics from PDFs, convert to HTML or RTF, and batch-convert files. For longer PDF files, you can choose which pages to convert. Amazingly, it’s quick and it works.

Recosoft’s PDF2Office for iWork ($60) is a similar application that converts PDF documents into editable documents for Apple’s Pages and Keynote applications. It preserves the PDF layout, maintains paragraphs and tables, and regroups independent graphics.

Jay Nelson

Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.