In Outlook or Lotus Notes you can convert attachments you send to PDF when you add them to your message or save incoming attachments as PDFs individually or automatically. What's more useful is the integration with Office apps for creating PDFS directly. The PDF Create Assistant for creating PDFs is broadly similar to the equivalent Adobe tool, although without the helpful layout tool for how multiple files should appear (and the first page of our PDF was an explanatory page that doubles as an advert for the PDF Converter software). There's a toolbar for IE, Firefox and Chrome that lets you convert PDFs on the Web to Word or Excel. If the PDF is locked, you'll still need the password to work with it.

This is very useful for updating a document you no longer have the original for, converting a brochure into a presentation - or getting information from online banking sites that only offer statements as PDFs into a spreadsheet. OCR PDFs back to editable documents with Nuance PDF Converter Professional Conversion is fast (less than a minute for a 42-page document) and very accurate the only spelling error was two words concatenated at the end of a line and images, tables, text boxes and other layout elements reflect the original PDF layout - but in a document you can edit. Integration with SharePoint lets you convert PDFs and send them to a SharePoint library (if the original PDF is there, the converter puts the new document in the same folder).

You can preview the pages and pick which ones you want it's nice to see icons for this (power users can fill in the same powerful but confusing-for-some regular expressions as Print dialogs like 2-6, 8-10, 12, 32-40) but they're far too small and hard to read compared to the big friendly buttons at the top of the dialog. The PDF Converter Assistant uses OCR to convert PDFs back into Office documents (in Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint or RTF formats.

Nuance's new PDF Converter 7 claims to be cheaper (£99 plus VAT) and easier to use, with tools for creating, editing and converting PDFs. Adobe Acrobat Professional is powerful but unwieldy I regularly create, proof and comment on multi-page PDFs and for every feature I appreciate there's one that has me tearing my hair out.

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