Guides

Guides

A few long answers rather than many short ones. Each of these came out of building the tools, and each says where the tool is the wrong choice.

• A bank statement into a spreadsheet, privately

  The most common thing people want from a PDF tool is also the one they should be most careful with. A statement is a list of everywhere you spend money.

• Making a PDF small enough to email

  When an attachment will not send, size is the first thing to check. Here is how to find out what the limit is, which PDFs can shrink and which cannot, and what compressing a PDF costs you.

• Converting iPhone HEIC photos to JPG, privately

  Photos of your family, your home, and your paperwork are among the most personal files you own. Converting them should not mean handing each one to a server you know nothing about, and it does not have to.

• Why your converted table has numbers in the wrong column

  Almost every PDF converter gets bank statements and invoices subtly wrong in the same way, and the reason is that a PDF has no columns in it at all.

• Combining phone photos and receipts into one PDF

  Expense reports, insurance claims, and applications often want a single file, and what you have is a camera roll. Here is how to turn a handful of photos into a single PDF that opens the right way up, and where the free tool runs out.

• Getting a table out of a scanned PDF

  A scan has no text in it to copy, so the usual advice does not apply. Here is what actually works, what it costs, and when to use something else.

• Splitting a PDF into pages, or pulling out a few

  Most of the time you do not need the whole PDF, you need pages 12 to 15 of it. Here is how to take exactly those, what the tool does with a page range, and where it stops.