Monthly Archives: September 2019

PDF to Word extraction

Task – you need to extract text and images from your PDF files and store them in Microsoft Word files.

Options – you can find hundreds of online sites that can do that for you.

Concern – your files are confidential, and you’re not sure if those sites are making copies of your files for ‘other’ purposes.

Practicality – you want to extract from hundreds or thousands of files, and processing each file online is going to be veeeeeery boring.

Try Easy PDF Explorer, a Windows application that helps you extract content from PDF to Word files directly on your computer.

User interface

Easy PDF Explorer uses the familiar Windows Explorer interface, so you can easily navigate your folders and select your files.

Select 1 or more PDF files, and Easy PDF Explorer will display the details of each file.  This is one benefit of Easy PDF Explorer – it allows you to work with batches of PDF files easily.

Extracting text and images from PDF to Word

When you want to extract text and images from PDF to Word, click on the Extract to Microsoft Word button:

This brings up the Extract to Microsoft Word window.

Enter the folder you want to store the extracted pages in and the file naming convention for the Word files.

 

For images, you can specify the maximum image size.  This means images larger than the entered width or height are resized to fit the entered dimensions.

In the example below, Easy PDF Explorer resizes any images wider or taller than 400 pixels to fit a 400 x 400 size.  Easy PDF Explorer maintains the aspect ratio when resizing the images.

 

You can also choose to exclude images smaller than a specific width or height where blank images are used as spacers, and you don’t want to include them in your Word file.

In the example below, Easy PDF Explorer will not extract images smaller than 2 pixels wide or 2 pixels tall.

 

And that’s all there is to it.  Use Easy PDF Explorer to extract text and images from PDF to Word from your hundreds or thousands of PDF files, on your computer, securely and fast.

 

Other Easy PDF Explorer features

In addition to extracting pages and splitting PDF files, Easy PDF Explorer can also:

Download a 14-day trial now, and see how Easy PDF Explorer can help you work with your PDF files faster and safer.

Extract text from PDF files

Task – you need to extract text from your PDF files

Options – you can find hundreds of online sites that can do that for you.

Concern – your files are confidential, and you’re not sure if those sites are making copies of your files for ‘other’ purposes.

Practicality – you want to extract text from hundreds or thousands of files, and processing each file online is going to be veeeeeery boring.

Try Easy PDF Explorer, a Windows application that helps you extract text your PDF files directly on your computer.

User interface

Easy PDF Explorer uses the familiar Windows Explorer interface, so you can easily navigate your folders and select your files.

Select 1 or more PDF files, and Easy PDF Explorer will display the details of each file.  This is one benefit of Easy PDF Explorer – it allows you to work with batches of PDF files easily.

Extract text from PDF

When you want to start extracting text from your PDF files, click on the Extract text button:

This brings up the Extract Text window.

You need to enter the folder you want to store the extracted text in.  You also need to provide the naming convention for the extracted pages, and if you want the text from each page to be saved to a different file.

In this example, we will be storing the images from each file in its own folder.

We use the <FILENAME_NOEXT> tag, so for a file named Accounting.pdf, all text from that file will be stored in the f:\exports\Accounting\ folder.

We will use the default naming convention of <FILENAME_NOEXT>_text.txt.

This uses the PDF file name and append the _text value to the file.  So in our example, our extracted text will be stored in a file named Accounting_text.txt.

Next, we need to choose if we want to store all the text from our PDF file into a single file, or separate them by pages into individual files.

If we choose a single file as per the above screenshot, we can enter a page separator value.  The default page separator will separate each page this way:

If you choose to store the text from each page in a separate file, then you need to enter a suffix for each of the files.

 

 

 

 

The default suffix of _<PAGENUMBER:0000> will create files this way:

And that’s all there is to it.  Use Easy PDF Explorer to extract text from your hundreds or thousands of PDF files, on your computer, securely and fast.

 

Other Easy PDF Explorer features

In addition to extracting text from your PDF files, Easy PDF Explorer can also:

Download a 14-day trial now, and see how Easy PDF Explorer can help you work with your PDF files faster and safer.

Extract images from PDF files

Task – you need to extract images from your PDF files

Options – you can find hundreds of online sites that can do that for you.

Concern – your files are confidential, and you’re not sure if those sites are making copies of your files for ‘other’ purposes.

Practicality – you want to extract images from hundreds or thousands of files, and processing each file online is going to be veeeeeery boring.

Try Easy PDF Explorer, a Windows application that helps you extract images your PDF files directly on your computer.

User interface

Easy PDF Explorer uses the familiar Windows Explorer interface, so you can easily navigate your folders and select your files.

Select 1 or more PDF files, and Easy PDF Explorer will display the details of each file.  This is one benefit of Easy PDF Explorer – it allows you to work with batches of PDF files easily.

Extract images from PDF

When you want to start extracting images from your PDF files, click on the Extract images button:

This brings up the Extract Images window.

You need to enter the folder you want to store the extracted images in, and provide the naming convention for each extracted image file.

In this example, we will be storing the images from each file in its own folder.

 

 

 

We use the <FILENAME_NOEXT> tag, so for a file named Accounting.pdf, all images from that file will be stored in the f:\exports\Accounting\ folder.

For each images, we will use the default naming convention of <FILENAME_NOEXT>_<PAGENUMBER:0000>_<IMAGEINDEX:0000>.

 

 

 

This uses the PDF file name, page number, and image index on each page to name the image files.  E.g. for the 4th image (jpg) on the 12th page from the Accounting.pdf file, the image file will be named

Accounting_0012_0004.jpg

Once we have set up our destination folder and file naming convention, we click on the Start button, and Easy PDF Explorer does the rest.

And that’s all there is to it.  Use Easy PDF Explorer to extract images from your hundreds or thousands of PDF files, on your computer, securely and fast.

Other Easy PDF Explorer features

In addition to extracting images from your PDF files, Easy PDF Explorer can also:

Download a 14-day trial now, and see how Easy PDF Explorer can help you work with your PDF files faster and safer.

Easy PDF Search

Easy PDF Search is our advanced PDF indexing and search tool.  Read how Roberto Mantovani, Assistant Professor at the University of Urbino (Italy), uses Easy PDF Search to help him search his collection of over 12000 PDF files totalling over 320 GB in size.

Split PDF files offline securely and fast

Task – you need to split a PDF file or extract certain pages from a PDF file.

Options – you can find hundreds of online sites that can do that for you.

Concern – your files are confidential, and you’re not sure if those sites are making copies of your files for ‘other’ purposes.

Practicality – you want to split hundreds or thousands of files, and splitting each file online is going to be veeeeeery boring.

Try Easy PDF Explorer, a Windows application that helps you split your PDF files directly on your computer.

User interface

Easy PDF Explorer uses the familiar Windows Explorer interface, so you can easily navigate your folders and select your files.

Select 1 or more PDF files, and Easy PDF Explorer will display the details of each file.  This is one benefit of Easy PDF Explorer – it allows you to work with batches of PDF files easily.

Splitting PDFs

When you want to start splitting or extracting pages from your PDF files, click on the Extract pages button:

This brings up the Extract Pages window.

You need to enter the folder you want to store the extracted pages in, the file naming convention, and the pages to extract.

You can specify exactly which pages to extract e.g. if you want to extract the page 1 and 10, simply enter the details like this:

 

 

 

If you want to extract the first 5 pages, enter it like this:

 

 

 

To extract the first 5 pages and page 10, enter it like this:

 

 

 

You can enter as many ‘groups’ of pages to extract as you require.  Just separate each group using a comma symbol.

What if you don’t know the number of pages the files have, and just want to extract the last 5 pages every time?  Use the <LAST> tag this way:

 

 

 

In this way, you don’t need to specify the exact page numbers to extract.  Easy PDF Explorer will always just extract the last 3 pages.

Creating the ‘other’ file

So far, we’ve showed you how to extract specific pages from your files.  What if you want to split a file i.e. extract the specific pages to one file, and the rest of the pages to another file?

Simple.  Just select the Extract remaining pages to another file item, and enter a naming convention for this file.

 

 

 

 

The pages you chose to extract will be saved in one file, and the remaining pages will be saved to another file.

And that’s all there is to it.  Use Easy PDF Explorer to extract or split pages from your hundreds or thousands of PDF files, on your computer, securely and fast.

 

Other Easy PDF Explorer features

In addition to extracting pages and splitting PDF files, Easy PDF Explorer can also:

Download a 14-day trial now, and see how Easy PDF Explorer can help you work with your PDF files faster and safer.

Easy Explorer – Advanced Search

In Easy Explorer 3, we introduced an advanced search option that allows you to search for files based on attributes other than its name.  To use the advanced search function, click on the Advanced Search button on the bottom of the explorer window:

This brings up the Advanced Search window, where you enter your search criteria.

On the left panel, a list of all the available file functions are displayed e.g. Name, Size, Created, Accessed, etc.  Clicking on any of the items will bring up the description on how to use that function.  There is also a list of support functions that’s required when working with dates, time, and text values.

The basic rule is that you use a single function like this e.g. search only for files smaller than 1024 bytes:

Size < 1024

You can combine multiple search criteria using AND and OR, but you must use brackets to group the criteria e.g. search only for files smaller than 1024 bytes or the name contains the word ‘finance’:

(Size < 1024) OR (NameContains(‘finance’))

There is no limit to the number of criteria you use, but the important thing is to use the brackets to group the criteria correctly e.g.

( (Size < 1024) OR (NameContains(‘finance’) OR NameContains(‘production’)) ) AND (Modified > EncodeDate(2019, 1, 7))

will (search for files smaller than 1024 bytes OR (the name contains the word ‘finance’ or ‘production’)), AND after all that, the file must have been modified after July 1, 2019.

Extended attributes

In addition to the normal file properties, you can also search based on the extended attributes.  To see which extended attributes are available on your system, right click on the column header in the explorer window to bring up the list of available columns:

and click on the More… item.  The list of extended attributes are then displayed.

To search an extended attribute, use the Attribute function e.g.

Attribute(‘Width’)

returns the Width attribute (if available) of the file.  So if the file is an image file, a value will be returned.  On our system, the Width attribute is displayed with a pixels suffix i.e.

So if we wanted to search for image files with a width of 3968 pixels, we would need to use this search criteria:

Attribute(‘Width’) = ‘3968 pixels’

We can also return the attribute as a number using the AttributeAsNumber function e.g.

AttributeAsNumber(‘Width’)

This function attempts to return the attribute’s text value (in this case ‘3968 pixels’) as a numerical value (3968).  If the attribute value cannot be converted to a number, a value of 0 is returned.

Now that we can get the width attribute as a number, we can easily apply range checks to it e.g.

AttributeAsNumber(‘Width’) > 3776
(AttributeAsNumber(‘Width’) > 3776) OR (AttributeAsNumber(‘Width’) < 1024)
(AttributeAsNumber(‘Width’) > 3776) AND (AttributeAsNumber(‘Height’) > 2048)

Extended attributes allow you to perform some very advanced searches.  For example, say we have the following Excel files:

We can search on the Authors and Subject attributes easily in Easy Explorer.  E.g.

Attribute(‘Authors’) = ‘Yeoh Ray Mond’

will return all files created by ‘Yeoh Ray Mond’.  If we want to search for all files containing the word ‘Financials‘ in its subject, we will need to use the TextContains function in addition to the Attribute function.  The Attribute function returns the full value of the specified attribute, so for the first file, it will return ‘Financials for April 2019’.  We could write the search criteria like so:

Attribute(‘Subject’) = ‘Financials for April 2019’

but it will limit our search to only the first file.  In this case, we want to return the third file too.  To do that, we use the TextContains function e.g.

TextContains(Attribute(‘Subject’), ‘Financials’)

TextContains takes 3 parameters.  The first parameter is the value to search in.  In this case, it will be the value of the Subject attribute.  The second parameter is the value to search for, in this case the word ‘Financials’.  The third optional parameter is to indicate if the search is case-sensitive.  The default value is false, so you could write the search criteria in any of these ways:

TextContains(Attribute(‘Subject’), ‘Financials’)
TextContains(Attribute(‘Subject’), ‘financials’)
TextContains(Attribute(‘Subject’), ‘finanCIALS’)

To perform a case sensitive search, pass TRUE in the third parameter e.g.

TextContains(Attribute(‘Subject’), ‘Financials’, TRUE)

There are also 2 additional text functions, TextStartsWith and TextEndsWith, that checks if the text starts or ends with a specific value respectively, and accepts the same parameters as TextContains e.g.

TextStartsWith(Attribute(‘Subject’), ‘Financials’)
TextStartsWith(Attribute(‘Subject’), ‘Financials’, TRUE)
TextEndsWith(Attribute(‘Subject’), ‘2019’)

To search for attributes with blank values, do a comparison with an emtpy value e.g.

Attribute(‘Subject’) = ”

Conversely, to search for attributes with values:

Attribute(‘Subject’) <> ”

The ability to search on extended attributes opens up a lot of possibilities:

  • For photos, you can search on camera attributes like exposure time, focal length, ISO speed, etc.
  • For Office files, you can search on document attributes like authors, manager, subject, comments, etc.
  • For multimedia files, you can search on attributes like bitrate, genre, length, etc.
  • For images, you can search on image attributes like width, height, and bit depth.

If you encounter any issues using the search function on extended attributes, please do drop us a line at support@yohz.com.

Download a FREE 14-day trial now and start searching for your files using extended attributes the easy way.

Searching for Word and Excel documents by extended attributes

In Easy Explorer, you can use the advanced search function to search for Word, Excel, or other Microsoft Office documents using its extended attributes values like author, subject, comments, etc.

In Windows Explorer, you can display those attributes by adding the columns e.g.

You can display the same attributes in Easy Explorer i.e.

To search on the extended attributes, click on the Advanced Search button in Easy Explorer:

In the search window, enter the attributes you want to search on.  Let’s start off with something simple – we want to search for documents whose author is ‘Hank Jareau’.  We enter our search condition like this:

and Easy Explorer will list all documents whose author is ‘Hank Jareau’.

However, Easy Explorer will not display documents where ‘Hank Jareau’ is a co-author.  To include those documents in our search, we use the TextContains function to look for documents where the Authors attribute contains ‘Hank Jareau’ i.e.

and our search results will be as follows:

Now say we want to search for all documents where the Comments attribute is ‘Call for interview’ or ‘Consider’.  We do this by using the OR function to add multiple search conditions e.g.

and our results:

You can add as many such conditions as you require, using a combination of the AND and OR functions e.g.

You can see that the advanced search function gives you unparalleled flexibility in searching for documents based off the extended attributes.  Note that Easy Explorer allows you to search across different folders, not just in a single folder.

Just select the folders you want to search in:

start the Advanced Search, and the search condition will be applied to each of the selected folders.

Click here to read more about the Advanced Search in Easy Explorer, or download a FREE 14-day trial now and start searching for your documents using extended attributes the easy way.

Search photos by EXIF data

In Easy Explorer, you can use the advanced search function to search for photos with specific EXIF attributes.

In Windows Explorer, you can display additional EXIF values for photos e.g.

You can display the same attributes in Easy Explorer i.e.

To search on the EXIF attributes, click on the Advanced Search button in Easy Explorer:

In the search window, enter the attributes you want to search on.  Let’s start off with something simple – we want to search for images created using our Olympus SH-50 camera.  We enter our search value like this:

and Easy Explorer will list all photos taken with the SH-50 camera.

What if we wanted to display photos captured by both our Olympus SH-50 and Panasonic LX-7 cameras?  We simply add the 2 conditions together using the OR keyword i.e.

and our search results will be as follows:

Now say we want to limit our search results even further by searching for photos which used a focal length of 5mm or shorter.  We simply use the AttributeAsNumber function to convert the focal length value to a number, and use that in our search condition i.e.

and our results:

You can see that the advanced search function gives you unparalleled flexibility in searching for photos based off its EXIF attributes.  Note that Easy Explorer allows you to search across different folders, not just in a single folder.

Just select the folders you want to search in:

start the Advanced Search, and the search condition will be applied to each of the selected folders.

Lastly, you can always change the search results view, to view thumbnails of all the photos matching the search conditions e.g.

Click here to read more about the Advanced Search in Easy Explorer, and download a FREE 14-day trial now and start searching for your photos using EXIF attributes the easy way.

If you need more advanced search options, give Easy Photo Search a try.  It indexes the Exif details in all your photos, thus returning search results much faster compared to Easy Explorer.  It supports raw image files and also PNG files that contain Exif chunks, and offers more features geared towards working with images.