It happens all the frickin’ time. Someone wants to convert a PDF file to Word. Fine, we have tools for that, but depending on the quality of the PDF, the resulting text may contain some errors or just complete gibberish. But then you find out that they had the original Word file all along. I hate that so much.

And now today happens! But this time it’s different. Someone wants to convert a PDF… to an Excel file. Are you fucking kidding me right now? I have an urge to run down the office with a megaphone screaming “WE DO NOT EDIT PDF FILES! WE MAKE PDFS WHEN WE’RE DONE EDITING THE DOCUMENT!”.

Our department keeps refusing conversions from PDFs to other formats, because the conversion is not always accurate or reliable, so we direct our users to the tools we have available for this sort of thing, while clearly pointing out the downsides of the conversion process and explicitly stating that ensuring the accuracy of the conversion is the responsibility of said user, not our department. Because, inevitably, the software WILL make some mistakes. Os become zeroes, 5 becomes the letter S and don’t even get me started on the whole capital i, lower l and number 1 situation.

And despite all of this, despite all the warnings and examples of failings in the past, nobody seems to get through their hollow skulls that they should avoid editing and converting PDFs just because of how much of a pain in the ass it is! Ugh.