If you use a Chromebook, tablet, smartphone or anything else that doesn’t have an arsenal of PDF tools on it, we’ve found a great website for you. With PDF Tools from SmallPDF you can manage just about everything you can think of when you want to edit a PDF.
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A little warning beforehand. As with all cloud services – whether or not free – you share data with ‘unknowns’. So what eventually happens to your document is always a bit of a wait. Often there is nothing wrong, but also leaked and (or) resold data regularly appears in all kinds of criminal databases.
As far as we are concerned, it is therefore unwise to have any document containing privacy-sensitive data processed by cloud services. Unless you are completely convinced that you can fully trust the relevant service. But for ‘sensitive’ data it is still better to invest in an app or program that runs locally on your system.
Large collection of tools
That being said: https://smallpdf.com/nl/pdf-tools is damn useful. In addition, the company promises to automatically delete uploaded documents from the server after an hour. Doesn’t sound illogical, because where should you store all those millions (and possibly many more) documents that are offered daily without the costs becoming astronomical?
In any case: on the aforementioned page you will see a large collection of online tools with which you can get started with PDFs. A large part consists of conversion tools. In addition, the converters that convert Office files to PDF are usually not really needed (except perhaps on a Chromebook), because most Office programs can also save in PDF format. Otherwise, it will be a completely different story.
Converting a PDF to, for example, a Word file is something that is much less common. To do this, click the Word to PDF button.
Drag a PDF from your device’s file manager to the blue area. Or click the button CHOOSE FILES, just what you want. In the latter case, use the file manager of your device again to browse to the PDF that you want to convert to a Word document.
Select the option on Convert to Word and click Choose option. Wait for a while for the conversion to complete and you can download your Word document.
Pay?
Just an interlude in between. You have probably also seen that other option, for paying users. In that case OCR is used, but that is not the most important.
In fact, given the conversion result, we’re guessing that OCR is used by default. The result is fine, but sometimes something goes ‘wrong’ with fonts. The same phenomenon that we know from other OCR programs such as Finereader or Acrobat. No drama, far from it. But it is a bit the ‘signature’ of OCR.
Anyway, what you really gain by taking out a subscription of €7.50 per month (when taking out an annual subscription) is that you can ‘process’ unlimited documents in succession with one of the available tools of your choice. At the same time, the safety measures are being increased, which is always nice.
If you only have to deal with a PDF every now and then, the free version will probably also suffice. But then you have to wait more than 7 hours between each action. That choice is yours.
A 7-day trial subscription is also available. If you cancel it properly within that trial period, you really don’t pay anything. If you forget to cancel, your subscription will start. Either the monthly subscription of a tenner per month or 12 x €7.50. As far as we’re concerned, not too much, but annoying if you didn’t intend to transfer your trial subscription to a real subscription. So watch out!
Compress: save storage and mail space
Once in the Pro environment you will find all tools in the menu bar, under the button Tools. Click on this and then on Shrink PDF. This is perhaps one of the most practical tools, as many PDF files generated by a variety of software are often quite poorly optimized. That’s not bad for a few pages, but for dozens or more.
By having the PDF taken care of by Smallpdf – which uses smart compression – this often saves a lot of file size after this action. And that often makes the difference between mailing or not.
With the compression tool just mentioned open, click again Choose files or drag your document to the center of the page. That works the same for all tools, by the way. After uploading and processing you can choose from an average or strong compression, whereby the stronger variant will have some quality loss but you will make more profit.
Even with our small test file, we already see a reduction of 40% in the position that produces the best quality. Choose the option of your choice and click (or tap) compression.
Terminate
Smallpdf offers many more tools. Signing (where you store your signature securely encrypted online and can therefore be reached anytime and anywhere). Or split PDFs into separate files (think separate chapters of a book), while merging is also an option. Furthermore, the service also offers installable apps for both iOS and Android, which makes working with all functionality even more efficient.
Finally: if you want to cancel your trial subscription, tap – once logged in to the site – on your name (logo) at the top right of the page. click on Account and then left Plan. Scroll down a bit and click Cancel subscription. Click the button again Cancel to confirm, enter a reason why you want to stop and click Understood.
Now you don’t have to worry about being charged. Provided you do this within seven days of your trial subscription.
