Kofax Power PDF "Powers" Past Adobe Acrobat--at Much Lower Cost.
July 21, 2021
Kofax Power PDF "Powers" Past Adobe Acrobat--at Much Lower Cost.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Power PDF Standard
Overall Satisfaction with Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance)
Kofax Power PDF is used in all of my consulting activities. It provides an easy-to-use platform for creating and editing .pdf files. Common tasks include combining various .pdf documents into a single file and cropping sections out of existing .pdf documents to create new ones. These capabilities are particularly valuable in the preparation of presentation materials for clients.
- Power PDF integrates well with the Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office ) modules. This makes it very convenient to create .pdf documents directly from Microsoft Word and Excel and automatically open the resulting .pdf document in Kofax Power PDF for any required post processing.
- Power PDF allows easy "drag-and-drop" assembly of a .pdf document composed of pages from various other .pdf documents. This capability is crucial to generating a single cohesive .pdf document from a variety of source applications.
- Power PDF's cropping function allows for easily picking out excerpts from a .pdf document for use in other .pdf documents or other applications. The ability to save these files in JPEG format also provides good flexibility for importing to other applications.
- The "View resulting PDF" check box is confusingly shown only in very small print near the bottom of the "Create PDF" application window. It would seem more logical to have this also listed somewhere in the "File>Options>" menu tree.
- Kofax Power PDF is much less costly than the comparable Adobe product.
- For small businesses, more flexible licensing would be helpful (e.g., low-cost 5-computer licensing plans).
- Updates (e.g., version 3 to version 4) should be less costly and include multi-computer special upgrade pricing.
The "ribbon" layout of Kofax Power PDF that is reminiscent of the Microsoft 365 apps (e.g., Word and Excel) helps to make the interface immediately somewhat familiar. The font control in the Comment>Text Box tool in version 4 of Power PDF is a dramatic improvement in gaining access to controlling fonts in text boxes--especially when compared to Adobe Acrobat.
Compared to earlier versions of Adobe Acrobat Standard up through version 10, Kofax Power PDF is much simpler to use--especially version 4--and cost substantially less. If I am working on a computer without a Kofax Power PDF license, I will still use Adobe Acrobat Reader DC for basic .pdf file display and printing, but it is nowhere nearly as powerful as Power PDF.
Do you think Tungsten Power PDF delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Tungsten Power PDF's feature set?
Yes
Did Tungsten Power PDF live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Tungsten Power PDF go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Tungsten Power PDF again?
Yes
Kofax Power PDF provides an easy-to-use platform for creating, editing, excerpting, and combining .pdf files. The "drag-and-drop" functionality for combining pages of various .pdf documents into a single, coherent document is probably the feature that I use the most, followed by the "crop" feature to excerpt elements of a .pdf page.