• Home

  • App picks

  • App of the day

App of the day

2 min read

PDF.co: App spotlight

How this app helps you customize and extract data from PDFs

By Elena Alston · February 23, 2022
PDF.co app logo on a bright red background

We all work with documents in some capacity. It's pretty much inevitable that at some point you'll be emailing a PDF to a client, signing an invoice, or even extracting key information from a report for your boss. 

But now imagine you deal with documents non-stop. Maybe you work in healthcare and have to process data by splitting, merging, or repairing PDF files (and accuracy is vital). Or, perhaps you're a paralegal and spend your afternoons extracting data to turn into legal contracts. That kind of manual processing gets old real fast. 

That's where PDF.co comes in. With it, you can automatically parse documents, split and merge PDFs, customize PDFs (with texts, images, and signatures), and extract any data. Think of it as a PDF toolkit that'll get more time back in your day to focus on your most important work. 

PDF.co origins: Creating a product based on user requests 

PDF.co is the product of ByteScout, which was founded in 2006. While most founders generally discover a gap in the market through trial and error, the PDF.co team took a different approach: listening to their users.  

They wanted a set of tools for PDF files and data extraction they'd be able to automate, so they could more easily read invoices, reports, and statements. 

Armed with that knowledge, a small team of experts who'd worked on data extraction solutions for enterprises joined forces to create an API platform that would extract all sorts of unstructured data from PDFs. 

The rest was PDF history.

Did you know? PDF.co was created based on real user requests—and the team still takes this approach today. They regularly add their users' most-wanted features. The result is a full toolkit of features for mastering PDFs.

PDF.co today: Leading the way with PDF file and data extraction

Today, thousands of customers (think NASA and BMW) use PDF.co's technology for PDF file and data extraction. Whatever your industry, from Fintech to education to healthcare—you can use the tool to easily extract data from documents and convert files into almost any format. 

The product comes packed with a ton of PDF tools. Whether you need to generate PDF from templates, convert your files into a different format, fill PDF forms, sign documents, split PDFs, translate your PDFs, or even add or read QR code barcodes, the world's pretty much your oyster when it comes to documents. 

Fave feature: The AI-powered Document Parser lets you read invoices, orders, statements, reports, and more with ready-to-use templates for reading fields and tables from PDFs.

Acceleration through automation: Popular PDF.co workflows

Unlock even more value out of your documents by connecting PDF.co with Zapier. That way, you'll be able to easily automate workflows with other apps you use. Here are a few popular workflows to get you started:

Convert new files in Dropbox to CSV using PDF.co and upload them back into Dropbox

Convert new files in Dropbox to CSV using PDF.co and upload them back into Dropbox
  • Dropbox logo
  • PDF.co logo
  • Dropbox logo
Dropbox + PDF.co

Add barcodes to Google Sheets from new Dropbox folders using PDF.co

Add barcodes to Google Sheets from new Dropbox folders using PDF.co
  • Dropbox logo
  • PDF.co logo
  • Google Sheets logo
Dropbox + PDF.co + Google Sheets

Convert new emails to PDF using PDF.co

Convert new emails to PDF using PDF.co
  • Email by Zapier logo
  • PDF.co logo
Email by Zapier + PDF.co

Convert new emails from IMAP to PDF using PDF.co

Convert new emails from IMAP to PDF using PDF.co
  • IMAP by Zapier logo
  • PDF.co logo
IMAP by Zapier + PDF.co

New to Zapier? It's workflow automation software that lets you focus on what matters. Combine user interfaces, data tables, and logic with thousands of apps to build and automate anything you can imagine. Sign up for free to use this app, and thousands more, with Zapier.

Get productivity tips delivered straight to your inbox

We’ll email you 1-3 times per week—and never share your information.

tags
mentioned apps

Related articles

Improve your productivity automatically. Use Zapier to get your apps working together.

Sign up
See how Zapier works
A Zap with the trigger 'When I get a new lead from Facebook,' and the action 'Notify my team in Slack'