About PDF to Word
The usual reason to turn a PDF into Word is that you need to change it and you no longer have the original. The hard truth is that a PDF contains no paragraphs. It contains instructions to put particular letters at particular positions on a page, so any converter has to guess where the lines join into paragraphs, where a table starts and where a heading ends.
This tool makes that guess as carefully as it can and writes the result as a .docx file you can edit in Word or a compatible program. The layout is read back into paragraphs, which is what makes the text editable and what makes the result approximate. This conversion runs on our conversion service rather than in your browser, because an office suite cannot run in a web page. The file is uploaded, converted and deleted as soon as the answer has been sent back. It is free, and there is no account.
How to convert a PDF to Word
- Choose the PDF. It should be a document made from a program, not a scan; a scanned page has no text to convert.
- Press the convert button. The file is uploaded to the conversion service, converted to .docx and returned.
- Save the .docx and open it in Word. Compare it page by page with the original PDF.
- Fix what moved. Simple documents come back nearly clean; complicated layouts come back roughly.
- If you only need to change a few words, consider Edit PDF instead. It edits the PDF in place and avoids the conversion altogether.
When you would use it
- Revising a contract, a CV or a report when the original file has been lost.
- Copying a long piece of text into a document of your own while keeping its headings and paragraphs.
- Reusing the content of a form or a letter as a starting point.
- Translating a document with a tool that takes Word files.
- Getting text out of a PDF for editing in a word processor.
What it will not do
- It is an approximation. Columns, text boxes, tables with merged cells and decorative layouts are the places where it is least reliable, and the document will not look exactly like the PDF.
- A scanned PDF is a picture, so there is no text to convert. Run OCR PDF first, then convert.
- Fonts that the converting machine does not have are substituted.
- A PDF over about 50 megabytes is refused, and a couple of conversions at a time is the most you can have running.
- It does not reverse a conversion perfectly. A Word file turned into a PDF and back again is never identical to the original.
How it compares
Opening a PDF directly in Word is possible in recent versions and uses a similar approach. If you have Word, try it as well and keep the better result.
For a short change, editing the PDF itself is safer than round-tripping through Word, because it leaves the layout as it was. For a heavy rewrite, converting and editing in Word is quicker once the layout has been tidied.
We published a longer explanation of why this is hard in why PDF to Word loses formatting.
Tips
- Convert only the pages you need. Splitting a long PDF first reduces what has to be fixed afterwards.
- Turn on "show formatting marks" in Word to see how paragraphs were built, which helps when text behaves strangely.