When to turn a PDF into Word
Sometimes a quote or a contract arrives as a PDF and you need to change one line before sending it back. Asking whoever made it for the source file is awkward, and retyping a long table is worse.
This tool reads the PDF and rebuilds it as an editable Word file. It works out where paragraphs and tables are and keeps as much as it can, but it won't come out identical to the original. The file goes to our conversion server and is deleted the moment it finishes.
How to use it
- 1Upload the PDF. Up to 30MB.
- 2Press Convert to Word. It usually takes about ten seconds.
- 3Open the .docx in Word, make your edits, and save.
Common questions
- Does this one stay in my browser too?
- No. This tool sends your file to our conversion server, because working out the paragraphs and tables inside a PDF is not something a browser can do. Both the original and the result are deleted as soon as it finishes.
- Will it match the original exactly?
- No. A PDF carries no notion of where a paragraph begins, so the layout is reconstructed by looking at where the characters sit. Text and tables usually survive; line spacing and margins shift a little, and spaces sometimes disappear between words. For editing a line or two it's more than enough.
- Does it work on scanned PDFs?
- Not usefully. A scan is a photograph of a page, so you get a Word file containing one picture. There is no OCR here to read text out of images.
- My table came out fragmented.
- Tables without ruling lines, or with merged cells, are easy to misread. If the table is the point of the document, editing it by hand in Word is usually faster.
- The fonts are different.
- A PDF often embeds only the characters it actually uses, so the original font can't be reused. A close match is substituted, which can nudge line breaks.