PDF is now the most common format for document archiving and the distribution of electronic manuals, brochures and FAQs. Furthermore, it's rapidly becoming the preferred format for delivering finished copy to commercial print shops. Mind you, it has taken Adobe's brainchild 15 years to become an overnight success.

Until recently, most of us have been content to be Portable Document Format consumers, so the only software we've needed has been a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader, but team workers and communications professionals of all types are increasingly being expected to deliver their work in PDF format.

Fortunately, the easiest way of creating a PDF file is also the cheapest, which is to install a PDF printer driver and then 'print' to file. ABBYY PDF Transformer Pro 2.0 incorporates this type of printer driver, so it works with any application that has a print function. Users of Microsoft Office (including Visio) may also invoke the driver from a special Office toolbar which makes life even easier.

But as its name suggests, PDF Transformer is not just about creating PDFs; it's also a means of transforming them into other formats, and if you've ever found yourself trying to cut and paste titbits from a PDF file for reassembly in a word-processor you'll know how useful this can be. 'A' level students will doubtless know exactly what we mean.

Using PDF Transformer you can turn existing PDF files into Word, Excel, RTF, HTML or plain text documents, and once a file has been converted you can make changes and resave the file as a new PDF. When used in this way, PDF Transformer gives you even more editing freedom than Adobe Acrobat, and without having to learn the foibles of an unfamiliar program. Admittedly, heavily formatted documents are not always easy to edit, but PDF Transformer makes an excellent job of duplicating all the features of a source PDF when converting it to Microsoft Word.

The lazy way of turning paper documents into PDF files is to scan them and then use each scanned image as a complete PDF page. But if you've ever paid 99p for a CD-based car manual on eBay you'll know just how unsatisfactory this method can be.

Although a scanned PDF looks just like a fully-composed document, you can't search it to find how the woffle sprocket should be attached to the thingummybob. PDF Transformer comes to the rescue with its 'PDF to searchable PDF' conversion. It uses ABBYY's built-in OCR engine to parse the scanned document and create a text layer that is fully searchable. The resulting file is resaved automatically as a new PDF with a slightly modified name. The quickest way of making this type of transformation is to right-click on a PDF file in Windows Explorer and use the option you'll find has been added to the context menu.

If the original document was scanned properly, the transformation will be near perfect apart from the odd word that may appear in an inconsistent font, but PDF Transformer can become confused by screenshots used as graphics, and by photographs that include text, because it tries to make them all searchable. Fortunately there's a custom-conversion mode, so when this happens all you need do is ask PDF Transformer to highlight the areas it has flagged as text, graphics and tables. You can then right-click on any problem area and redesignate it as the correct type.

A great deal of thought has gone into making the program easy to use. Most tasks can be accomplished in one or two clicks using only the default options, and when tweaking is required all the commonly-used settings are present in a single control panel.

Serious tweak freaks are also catered for. They should ignore all the hand-holding modes and dive straight into the PDF printer driver's Properties box. From there they can play with paper sizes, resolutions, compression types, downsampling options, watermarks, bookmarks, overlays and much more. It's geeks' heaven.

If you like the idea of working with PDF files but can't afford the time to learn all the ins and outs, this program is just what you need. You'll be up and running in minutes and nobody will know you took the easy option.