Admit it, you’ve heard that scanned PDF documents can actually be edited, but you still don’t know how? Maybe you’ve been rewriting documents manually, instead of testing different PDF conversion tools and finding a way to make your scanned paper fillable. Or maybe you’ve had patience to play with different tools such as ScanSnap, but you’d always end up with a converted PDF to Word with still locked, not fillable text. If these situations sound familiar, then the next few paragraphs will be helpful and give you a clear picture of how you can get a fillable scanned document. To explain the process of extracting editable data out of scanned PDF, we will use PDF Converter Elite 4, a tool that has an OCR engine which makes the process of scanned PDF conversion quick and easy.
First, you need to download PDF Converter Elite 4 which is available for free as a 7-day trial. Then start the program and open a scanned PDF you want to convert.
Click on the Edit menu and change OCR options as shown in the image below. It’s always set as Default and you need to change it to Convert Using OCR.
Then select the type of conversion by clicking on one of the buttons on the menu. You can choose to convert PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, HTML, OpenOffice, AutoCAD, Image.
When you click that button, a panel will open on the right side with select options. You can select to convert the whole document, a specific area like a paragraph or particular pages of the document.
Depending on what conversion type you need, there will be different options to choose from. For instance, for PDF to Word conversion there are 3 types of conversions you can choose from: standard, frames and text only. The default option is standard, but if you want to convert only a part of the text, then text only option is the best fit. For PDF to Excel conversion, there are advanced options that let you personalize your Excel output in advance. When you click the Advanced Options button, the panel will open as in the image below:
As you can see, there are different settings such as add/delete tables/columns/rows and much more. All these options help you edit a PDF according to your preferences.
When you are done, just click the Convert button and that’s it. Your scanned document will now be fillable and ready for further editing.
