PDF to Word

How to convert a PDF to Word

Most PDF to Word sites send your file to their server. This one reads it inside your browser, so contracts, CVs and bank letters never leave your computer.

1. Drop the PDF on the box at the top.
2. Choose Keep the look to get the pages as they are, or Just the text to get the words in plain Word style.
3. Press Convert to Word.
4. Check what was found, then press Save the Word file.
5. Open the .docx in Word, Google Docs, Pages or LibreOffice and edit it.

Keep the look

Each Word page is the same size as the PDF page. Every line of words is put back as real Word text, in the same place, size, weight and colour, so you can change it and it still looks like the original.

Photographs, logos, signatures and other drawings become separate Word pictures in the same place, so you can click one to copy, move, resize or delete it. A logo or signature on a plain background comes out see-through, ready to drop onto another document. The page colour, bands and lines are set behind everything in the page header, so they stay put while you work.

If the PDF uses a font your computer does not have, Word shows a close one instead, and a changed line can run longer than the space it had. Words set sideways stay part of the picture they sit on.

Just the text

The words are worked out from the page the way you would read it: text set clearly larger is a heading, lines close together are one paragraph, and a line starting with a bullet or a number is a list item. They come out as Word Heading 1 to 3, normal paragraphs and real bulleted and numbered lists, so the navigation pane shows the headings and pressing Enter in a list carries it on.

Lines broken in the middle of a paragraph are joined again, words split with a hyphen are put back together, and page numbers and the header or footer repeated on every page are left out. Links stay links. Fonts, colours and pictures are left out, and tables come out as their words, a line each. This is the better choice when you want to rewrite the document rather than touch it up.

What it cannot do

A scan has no words in it at all, only a photograph of each page. The tool notices that and says so. Run the file through OCR PDF first, then convert the result here.

Keep the look puts a picture of every page in the Word file, so a very long PDF makes a large file. For a document of hundreds of pages, take out the pages you need with Split PDF first.