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PDF nightmares? Power PDF can solve them.
Updated December 13, 2023

PDF nightmares? Power PDF can solve them.

Ricardo G Lopes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Power PDF Standard

Overall Satisfaction with Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance Power PDF)

I use it for legal documents as well as business forms for different industries and also help my attorneys when they need some limited scale OCR. I also do translations, so I use it for export translated documents. One of the best features is to print documents in PDF when the original is protected, and the same judicial branch asks a non-protected hard copy, so you can file a copy of a petition. I use the software to add comments and editing to help the review by other parties. Object editing is another area where the product helps to remove non-focus areas, so it remains only the focused ones.
  • Editing Text and Image
  • Adding images
  • Bookmarks management
  • Scanner integration
  • Pages Handling
  • Convert menu and its help are not easy to understand. Trial and error is the workaround.
  • Crop, a pretty simple feature, has a non-intuitive way to perform the crop action. It is not easy to figure out when a crop size applies or not to other pages.
  • Typewriter mode looks like the commentary feature or Text editing. I never used as I could not understand the benefits. Maybe a YouTube video would help.
  • Fill out electronically an existing hardcopy form. It is unclear whether the product does it.
  • Productivity is so high that I could not work without it. Of course, I could go to competition, but with a dent in my current productivity.
  • Power PDF includes some limited OCR version, which is a big plus, especially for not so complex OCR tasks. It saves you money by not buying a full OCR.
  • Power PDF integration with the proprietary scanner driver software makes a seamless transition as you don't need to be retrained on the scan procedure.
Adobe Acrobat has become a bit like a chameleon, as it is a multi-generation product that lost its identity. Power PDF needs to pay attention to this point, as the product is evolving and could be a too rich-featured product, therefore a bit too complex to use for a regular user.
Every time I talk to them, they could give me a clear solution or a clear answer. Waiting times were excellent. Support web pages have a record of all support interactions and the product that you own. Again, if Product Help was better, it would save hundreds of minutes of support. YouTube videos would really help.
1) Attorneys' pages handling, where there are hundreds of existing litigations documents and we need to select some pages and create new ones.
2) Filtering out sections of very long documents and create new ones only with the selected ones.
3) Apply images to documents even signatures and logos.
4) Office automation, especially manual forms evolving to electronic PDF forms.
5) Consolidation of several document types such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel and many other non-MS Office into one single document.

Using Kofax Power PDF

Most tasks are intuitive, but the ones, I have cited already. To get a 10, the Help file should be rewritten. It is not thorough, confused, and sometimes inconsistent.
Menus are well structured, although the Page Rotated section of the ribbon looks a bit out of place.
Recent files are well located front and center.