And the winner is…

Dear Friends,

The PDF2XL Birthday greetings contest is over and we have a winner!

In the past month, we celebrated the 5th birthday of PDF2XL – Cogniview’s flagship product. As part of the celebration, we invited you (our blog readers and customers) to leave a birthday greeting on the blog.

We also promised that the authors of the 10 best greetings will receive a $20 Amazon gift card. And that the two best greeters will win a Kindle 3G Wireless Reading Device. Well the party is over and it’s time to give out the prizes…

But before I reveal the winners, I’d like to say that we were really moved by your reaction. I’ve personally read the 170+ greeting several times, some of the greetings you left made me laugh and some were so exciting, they made me tear up a bit.

I’d like to thank you for letting us know that we make a real difference in your lives. It means a lot to me and the rest of the team here at Cogniview.

And now to the winners – the 1st place goes to…

Frank Kotulak said…

I was so happy to hear of your good fortunes, your longevity and your excellent product which we use daily.

I had worked for the County less than a month when I was given a 3 year old problem of transcribing state data that came in PDF form to usable information. Attempts had been made to duplicate the programming process with no success and it took 1 months of manpower to transcribe everything manually.

Rather than the programming approach I decided to look for and of course find a screen-scraping utility such as PDF2XL that could accurately and reliably transform PDF data into an Excel spreadsheet. PDF2XL did (and continues to do) the trick!

The work savings time for what was an intractable, unsolvable 3 year problem went from one month to one hour.

For my effort and good fortune to find your product, I was given a county based “make a difference” award because of it and no employee had ever received such an award after one months of employment!

So I say hear, hear! to your 5 year birthday and a great product! May you have a 10 year birthday celebration!

Javier Cobis said…

I am really convinced that one must find tools that reduce repetitive and boring activities in order to really focus on those important ones. Mankind has always tried to do so by many ways. Most machines invented have been created precisely because of this: printing revolution is a good example. Instead of worrying about making copies of the same book again and again… it permitted, on the other hand, to worry about creating new ideas, new books, and as a consequence, progress accelerated, as well less pain and healthier lives were possible, most of the time.

To me, this program has made things easier. Before knowing about it, I was thinking about how to extract a lot of very important digitalized data and I thought it would take too much time to do it in a practical way…..Can you imagine typing a huge overwhelming torrent of data sheet by sheet everyday for, as least, approximately, one year?. At that moment, I promptly started to find out a better way to do so, until…I found PDF2XL.

That day I was very impressed that the solution for that problem really existed, and for the first time I was convinced that I could accomplished my mission: an academic goal I had started to pursue at that time. Otherwise, it would have been almost impossible to do that without changing the subject of the investigation. It was a lot of data”asking” for somebody to understand them and about to say something to people.

Well, as a result of all that, I truly express my gratitude to PDF2XL for contributing to make life easier, minimizing those activities really repetitive and boring through a great, well-conceived program it really is, and even better people behind it: no many providers offer a really good, genuine care to customers and attention to details like Cogniview always does.

Thank you very much, Congratulations and Happy Birthday PDF2XL!

JCR

Second place winners – $20 Amazon Gift card…

David said…

Congratulations on your 5th anniversary! You have made my life easier and you deserve all the best. I hope you like the picture: http://kcy.me/el5

David Sanz, Account dpt. Barcelona, Spain

Steve Wells said…

No fancy thoughts here.  Just a simple testament.  I had PDFs containing data on literally millions of feet of drilling from a couple of gold mines in Canada.  I desperately needed to do detailed analysis on that data.  I needed to bring it into a SQL Server database in order to do that but doing it manually was simply not feasible.

Your product PDF2XL made that project possible and indeed not too difficult at all.  The data import was done and the analysis made me a good bit of money as it allowed me to invest in a nearby miner with confidence that the nearby miner was hitting grades in their diamond core drilling that were consistent with proven mines next door.

So, your product paid for itself many, many times over.  In effect, you created not just great software but also great economic value.  That’s not easy and it’s a hugely important thing.  Congratulations on a 5 years and here’s wishing you many more.  The money I spent on your product was some of the best invested money ever from my perspective.

David Said…

Wow, how times flies. It felt like it was yesterday that I tried in vain figuring out how to convert a pdf to excel. I tried this product and that product and they all felt out of place, incomplete, or too hard to use, etc. Then as luck would have it, I came across pdf2xl. I was amazed how smooth, fast, easy and very well developed the program was. Productivity wise, it’s a timesaver. Status wise, it amazes others that I can convert pdfs so quickly and accurately. Kudos to the developers for creating such a helpful program. I love it and will continue to support the product and spread the word.

The next evolution for the program would be to create mobile app versions, Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile for those quick on the go situations when a conversion is needed.

Happy 5th Birthday and hope for many more.

Chong P. Yun Said…

Congratulations for you, my Best Relationships……!!!!

Happy 5th birthday! I always try to find an easy solution to all my work problems. and then I found you, I tried it and the rest is history. You just don’t know how much easier my life has been. When your boss thinks you can do magic that’s just great. I just wish I had found you sooner.

Very happier, you make my life very important every day.

Thanks for helping users create data from PDF files.

I was so happy to hear of your good fortunes in the world, your longevity and your excellent product which we use daily.

So I say hear, hear! to your 5 year birthday and a great product! May you have a 10 year birthday celebration!

I think that you are the best friends in providing solutions in my work.

Congratulations on your 5th year!!! once again…….!!!!!!!

Chong P. Yun, Acropolis Appraisal, Real Estate Appraiser, Bellevue, WA

Shawn Setnicky Said …

I’ve said over and over how great of a product PDF2XL is. It’s not easy getting my company to buy things, but once I showed them how much time I save, they were ready to buy.

Among my other conversion jobs, the big one I receive each year is a 400 to 500 page list of about 7000 buyers. They give you the list free, but it’s in PDF format, which I can’t print labels from, and the information is spread across two lines.

One year we spent hours manually retyping the data (not my idea, I just work here). Four people typed for hours. Imagine the cramped fingers and errors that were probably made.

With PDF2XL was able to cut my time down significantly and reduce my error margin to none.

If you add up my hourly pay rate that I’d normally spend doing all this work and then look at the price for PDF2XL, the company is saving thousands of dollars each year.

Thanks! Happy Birthday!… by the way, I forgot to mention in my last message that the place we get our buyer list from DOES make one in Excel format, but they charge you .20 cents a name! That’s roughly $1400 saved right there.

Shawn Setnicky, Sonali Corporation, Administrative Assistant

Shasvat Sharma…

Really ? Only 5 yrs. old ? Honestly, it is rare to see any company create a product that is extremely useful at such a young age. Productivity can be measured in time and money and PDF2XL has saved us both in extreme quantities. We just upgraded and renewed our licenses because we now literally (and figuratively) cannot proceed without including PDF2XL in our project plans. PDF2XL is one of the greatest inventions, and if you see the person who invented the wheel … tell em’, “We said so”. Because we can still get by without a wheel (walk to work), but cannot work without PDF2XL.

Wish you a happy “5th” birthday and extreme success for the future.

Robert Del Riego Said…

I bought your program to deal with a specific client project and it was a life saver. The project completed successfully, and I thought great, that was worth it, now back to normal business. Next I know, another client comes along with a similar problem. Then another. Being a bit slow, I finally came to see just how widely useful this program could be. Now I’m using PDF2XL ALL THE TIME. I’m afraid I’m going to wear it out. I’ve even turned on an associate to it and she loves it. So, happy birthday? Hell yes, Happy Birthday! Glad you were born!

Chistopher Said…

Happy birthday! After reading books and articles saying that no more than 5% of new enterprises survive for more than a year, I know that PDF2XL is a story of success for Cogniview. So, what good points can you draw from that experience?

If you look through the theory, you can say a number of factors: risk analysis, pareto analysis, adequate planning and decision making… But every of this good characteristics remit to a essential factor for success: Good people.

And for them is the greeting in this fifth birthday: Not for the company, not for the sole management, not only for shareholders, but for all of those good people who had their impact in the success story you are living now. Congratulations and continue making our world a better world, not by your products, but by your good being.

Charles Rother Said …

Happy Birthday PDF2XL! Since you have come into to my life, you have brought me joy, happiness and fulfillment. I now can get my work done and still have a life.  Before you came into my life, I spent countless hours manually typing reams of data.  Before you arrived, I searched the whole world for you.  In fact, before I found you, I had several flings with much more expensive, but inferior products proclaiming to do what you do. After trying other products, I conclude nobody does it better than PDF2XL!

After you came into my life, you have helped me so much. In just a few mouse clicks, my hundreds of PDF pages are easily and accurately converted.  PDF2XL, you have saved me $15,000 and approximately 150 hours each year.  Happy Birthday! Thank you for being the best product in the category.

Chris Said…

Your story is an awesome example of how often our first attempts and ideas aren’t the most effective in generating income or growth.  I love how you turned to your customers and asked/saw what they wanted and used that to find a market that would pay for what you could provide instead of just throwing in the towel. I read about another company the other day that just said “well we’ve tried to make money and we just haven’t been successful” – on that blog post a whole bunch of customers were saying well if you would offer a yearly subscription plan we would pay you!  Had they gone to their customers they could have saved their business and years of work.  Nice work, great story, Happy Birthday and if you keep building your business the way you have thus far you’ll have many more birthdays to come!

Thank you all,

Hadar

Posted on November 23, 2010 by hadar 
Filed Under Uncategorized

Comments

2 Responses to “And the winner is…”

  1. Document Collaboration on April 12th, 2011 3:24 pm

    Great article..basically i use this conversion in rare cases..thank you

  2. Enoch on December 16th, 2011 6:55 pm

    Surprising

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