Nuance Power PDF Advanced review: quality PDF editor that's cheaper than Acrobat Pro

Many PDF editors and converters are aimed at either home or art markets Nuance's Power PDF Advanced is instead aimed at the business user so it provides several features for professionals that you won't find in home packages. As such, it’s not exactly cheap and if you don’t need the professional features, as most home users probably won’t, you can buy a PDF editor for much less. However, if you do need to archive a lot of electronic documents or send proofs around for comment or correction, it is well under half the price of Adobe Acrobat XI Pro. (See also: best PDF tools.)

First impressions are favourable. Power PDF Advanced adopts the 'ribbon' interface first popularised by Microsoft Office, which many users will now prefer as it avoids having to work down through several levels of menus. This isn’t universal among PDF editors, Acrobat being the most obvious alternative to have stuck with the more conventional menu-based interface similar to its other graphics products including Photoshop and Illustrator. This makes a lot of sense if your target audience is graphic designers, but in a small business, the ribbon-style interface is more familiar.

The ribbon can make it a lot easier to do certain things within the program. For example, to scan a document for optical character recognition (OCR) and turn it from an image PDF to a searchable one in Acrobat requires you to click Tools / Text Recognition / In this file, if working through menus. With Power PDF Advanced, it's a single button in the Home tab of the ribbon – just one click.

This is just the icing on the cake, though, and Power PDF offers features which, at first sight, are exactly what you’d expect of a business-oriented PDF editor. In particular, you can create PDFs, either using a pseudo printer driver from any Windows software or you can use the toolbars provided in Office applications.

You also have full facilities for editing PDFs although certain restrictions do exist, as a result of the format of PDF files. Accordingly, the scope for editing will always be limited compared to the facilities offered in the software used to create the original document. More business-oriented features include digital signatures and ID certificates for security purposes, tools for collaborative review, the ability to create forms that can be filled in later, batch processing for converting several PDFs without continual human supervision, and provision for embedding multimedia content.

The OCR engine in Power PDF Advanced is from OmniPage, and in our tests produced good results, as long as the original documents were in fair-to-good condition. Once you're working with a searchable PDF, Power PDF Advanced's search facilities include Look Like Search, which includes ready-made templates for credit-card numbers, dates, emails and phone numbers, as well as scope for crreating custom ones. This can be very useful for extracting data from multiple files. See all software downloads.

Nuance Power PDF Advanced review: batch mode

Working in batch mode and automating file conversion to PDF is not as comprehensive as in Acrobat XI Pro, which has more operations available for its batch scripts. Power PDF Advanced partly compensates by offering a ‘watch folder'. Designate a folder and any files copied into it will automatically be converted to PDF.

We tested the software by trying to compile a PDF from a variety of different files, including a Microsoft Word document, a JPG photo, other PDFs and a brochure produced in Microsoft Publisher. We were pleasantly surprised when Power PDF Advanced got to the Publisher file, opened Publisher, loaded the document, printed it to PDF and added it to the combined PDF we were building.

Document compilation and adjustment is made simple by the use of drag-and-drop thumbnails. You can mix and match documents, photos, spreadsheets and graphics of different sizes into the same PDF Package, the older standard, or PDF Portfolio, the new.

Conversion can be carried out well in both directions and the software supports Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and also WordPerfect, without the need to run those applications to convert. If you are running them, Power PDF Advanced tabs are added to the ribbons of all the main applications, so you can convert in-situ.

As well as its OmniPage OCR, Nuance has incorporated another of its technologies. Dragon speech recognition is brought to bear as Dragon Notes, so you can dictate sticky notes, to comment on the content of a PDF document. This is handy if you already use speech recognition in other parts of your work, although no headset is supplied.

Also read: How to edit PDFs for free; How to modify a PDF using free and online tools.

Nuance Power PDF Advanced: bottom line

Overall, we found Nuance Power PDF Advanced to be intuitive and easy to use. We have little doubt that most users will be able to quickly get up and running with it. We found the reviewing features particularly comprehensive, proving means of commenting, marking text in various ways and drawing attention to parts of a document.

Given that it's so much cheaper than Acrobat, it makes a lot of sense for small business use.

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