WHAT IS THE BEST PDF TO WORD CONVERTER

I use Adobe Acrobat Pro pretty regularly with good results (provided that the PDF is of at least decent quality). I have used OmniPage Pro before and that yields very good output that you can actually interact with the OCR process for greater accuracy (essentially, if the program is not sure about something, you can intercede to inform what any particular letter is) to yield a Word document.

We use ABBYY PDF Transformer ( http://pdftransformer.abbyy.com/ ) at my workplace. I haven't used others so I can't offer a personal comparison, but I thought I'd at least offer another option.

Acrobat Pro converts tables better than the other converters I know.  Acrobat Standard is cheaper than Pro and supposedly does conversion too (I have not tried it).  The problem with Acrobat is that it puts everything in frames, including every table, paragraph or other element of the page.  If you have long documents with lots of small indented paragraphs you will hate that, but if you have many large tables it's worth it.

Depending on your situation maybe you could convert your document with Acrobat and also with something else and then merge manually the table parts and the flowing text parts.

But before you spend money use some free trials on some typical documents you have.  One little-known converter that does an Ok job on most documents is SolidConverter http://www.soliddocuments.com/products.htm?product=SolidConverterPDF  It is what Workshare Compare (a.k.a. DeltaView) uses internally to compare PDFs together.

You mentioned "Nuances PRO", but I'm not sure which product you mean by that. Their Nuance PDF Converter Professional 7 can handle tables:
http://www.nuance.com/products/pdf-converter-professional7/index.htm
Regards, Joe

Correction: Acrobat 8 "puts everything in frames" but Acrobat 9 doesn't.