This place is a wealth of information, thanks to our great GOGers. Can someone recommend a FREE program to convert a PDF (in this case, a D&D Next character sheet) to a Word or Excel file that I can fill my info into? I already searched the internet myself and I keep coming up with crappy results, so I'm hoping someone can recommend something that they themselves successfully use. Ability to carry graphics over is a must for me, not just the text!

Thank you one & all!

Um there isn't a free one that I know of - you can try and cut and paste. It's a bit ugly and you'll have to reformat.

But I'll keep my eye on this thread in case anyone does know of a "free" reformatter of PDF's.

Ok found one - not sure if it works though

http://www.pdftoword.com/


and

http://www.pdftoexcelonline.com/

Yeah, I don't know. I did a search and a ton of stuff came up, lots of them "free" in quotation marks. I'd say just give a few a try and see what happens. Anything deeper than that, someone else will have to respond. :-)

Agreed - lots of "free" converters if you google.

I've used NitroPDF with good results in the past.

http://www.nitropdf.com/free/

The web-based converters (PDF to Word and Excel, among others) are free. If you want a desktop version there is a 14-day trial, otherwise requiring payment. But the online converters are more than enough and have always worked great for me.

Cool - those links are to Nitro! Thanks for the recommend, mondo84!! ;-)

As it stands, you'll only get mediocre results at best from such a conversion. PDF is a purely layout-based format. Because it's not designed for editing, it doesn't contain paragraph information, proper formatting marks etc. Specifically in the case of character sheets, tables won't be rendered properly.

I've tried using NitroPDF for work before and results were less than impressive.

Try this one:
http://www.somepdf.com/some-pdf-to-word-converter.html

Upload the pdf to googledocs, converting it to a google doc in the process.
Download the resulting doc as a Word file.

I don't know how well this preserves table formats and the like.

Oh this is one of those topics you just have to fav for the sake of future college researches hahaha!

Interesting, I'll have to try that some time.

In general though, I think this really calls for some form of OCR, PDF being a display format, really doesn't take too kindly to editing. Which is why some software like Libreoffice allows you to embed the original document in the PDF for future editing.

Calibre can convert from pdf to rtf.
http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#what-formats-does-app-support-conversion-to-from
However the result varies a lot based on the input pdf
http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conversion.html#pdfconversion

Surely for a D&D character sheet you can just print it out blank and fill in with a pencil... ;)

Yeah, the thought had occurred to me to go completely old-school but I'm a little OCD about it & I've got my mind set on copying & pasting the info I'm not rolling dice for. Weird, I know. :-\

So the ones suggested aren't quite coming out right. Maybe some kind of PDF editor instead of a converter?

Do you specifically need that character sheet? I recall finding quite a few with editable fields back when I was playing, not to mention quite a few character generators that could export/print the character sheets.
If you wish, I could try looking for some, but I'd (obviously) need to know what D&D Edition you will be playing.