Convert PDF to DOCX or DOC and edit it in Word

To convert a PDF to a Word document, select or drop it on this page, keep DOCX under Word version, press Convert to DOCX and download the result. For PDF to DOC, pick DOC (Word 97) instead; the page suggests it only for software from before 2007. The file is named after your PDF, so report.pdf comes back as report.docx.

A PDF is a finished page, built for reading and printing. To change a PDF to Word, the document has to be rebuilt rather than copied: its words, tables, columns and pictures are laid out again as Word text and objects. That is why the conversion is graded Very good and not exact, and why the odd margin, font or line break can move. Most people convert PDF to editable Word files to fix a typo, update a date or reuse a paragraph, and a PDF to Microsoft Word conversion here ends with an ordinary document you open, change and save in Word.

Starting from another kind of file? Convert HTML to Word for a saved web page, convert PowerPoint to Word for a deck, convert RTF to Word for a Rich Text file, or convert ODT to Word for an OpenDocument text file.

A scanned PDF holds pictures of pages and no text. When a PDF has no text in it, the words on its pages are read first and written into Word as plain paragraphs you can edit. The result is simpler than the page:

• Each line of the scan becomes its own paragraph, so a sentence that wrapped onto a second line is split in two. Joining those lines is the main tidying job.
• A table comes back as lines of words and figures, without its grid.
• Bold, italic and pictures are left out: only the words come through.

The words on a scan are read as English. On a scanned English page in our test, every word was right except one name, where Ø came out as @, plus a bracket that was not on the page. A scanned French letter stayed readable, but some accents were dropped or changed (à côté became a coté, fenêtre became fenétre), and the year at the end of the last line moved to the top. Check names, numbers and accented words before you rely on the text.

When the PDF has real text, this is the quickest way to copy a table from a PDF to Word: the table arrives as a Word table, not as loose lines. In our test, a table of four rows and three columns came back with all twelve cells in place, pound signs included, ready to resize, restyle or add rows to. The guide on how to convert PDF to Word with tables lists what most often goes wrong, such as borderless tables and merged cells, and what to check.

Bold and italic stay, and every PDF page starts a new page in Word. A page set in two columns came back as a Word section with two columns, the left one first. The Word file asks for the fonts the PDF used, by name; if one is not on your computer, Word shows another in its place, and lines can wrap differently.

Long PDFs are split into 25-page parts, converted side by side and joined back into one file: a 417-page test PDF came back as a single DOCX with every page. The page limit for DOCX is 2,000. DOC is made from the DOCX in a second step, in one go rather than in parts, so keep DOCX for a long PDF.

To edit a PDF in Word, convert it here, open the DOCX in Word and make your changes. When it is ready to send, convert Word to PDF to fix the layout again. That conversion uses free fonts made to the same widths as Calibri, Cambria, Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, so text in those fonts takes the same room as it did in Word. Aptos has no such twin, so its lines can wrap a little differently.

If you only need the words and not a layout to edit, convert PDF to text for a plain .txt file instead.