PDF to Word

More about this tool

This converts a PDF into a Word document (.docx) without uploading it anywhere. The text is read out of the PDF in your browser, grouped back into paragraphs, and written into a Word file you can edit — with the typefaces, sizes, colours and spacing it had, its links intact, and its pictures at their own position on the page. Not a picture of the pages, and not a page of floating text boxes.

When to use it

When you need to change something in a document you only have as a PDF: a resume, a letter, a report, a form someone sent you. Also when you want to reuse the words somewhere else without retyping them.

What it will not do

A PDF stores letters at positions, not paragraphs, so a Word file made from one is a reconstruction. The words, their order, their type, colour and spacing, the headings, the lists, the links and the pictures — at their own position, not just carried along in reading order — come across; a grid of rows and columns that repeats — a price list, a schedule — is rebuilt as a real table too, though a PDF never says which lines were meant as one, so this is read from how they line up rather than from anything the file declares. A one-page PDF stays one page: every paragraph keeps the line spacing and the gap to the next one it measured from the source, rather than Word's own flat default added on top of each. The exact layout does not come across, and headers and footers are dropped. A scanned PDF is a picture of a document and holds no text until OCR PDF adds some — run it through that first. For a document you need to look identical, keep the PDF.