Convert a PDF to Word

How to use it#

1. Drop a PDF onto the box above, or click it to choose one.
2. Check the text in the box. Untick Start each PDF page on a new page to run the pages together, or tick Keep the PDF’s line breaks for addresses, lists, or verse.
3. Press Download .docx and open the file in Word.

What the Word file keeps, and what it leaves behind#

You get the words, in reading order, with each paragraph as a paragraph in Word. The lines of a paragraph are joined up again, so the text wraps to Word’s margins and an edit flows the way it would in any document you typed yourself. Accents, symbols, and other alphabets come through as they are.

You do not get the look of the page. Columns, fonts, sizes, bold and italic, colours, and pictures are all gone, and the text is set in plain Calibri. A table arrives as lines of values rather than a Word table. Headers, footers, and page numbers are text on the page, so they come across as short paragraphs you may want to delete. Use it when you need to change the wording, reuse a passage, or translate a document. If the page has to look the same afterwards, this is the wrong tool.

If the look matters, change the PDF itself instead. The add text tool puts new words on a page, the form filler types into a form’s own fields, and the image extractor saves the pictures this file leaves out.

Scanned PDFs have no text to convert#

A scan is a photograph of a page. It shows words, but the file holds only pixels, so there is nothing for any converter to put into Word. PDFs from a scanner, a phone camera app, or a fax are usually like this. When a page has no text the tool names it, and when no page has any it says so rather than handing you an empty document.

Scans need OCR, which recognises the letters in the picture. Run the file through the PDF OCR tool first, which also works in your browser, and bring the searchable copy it gives you back here. Recognition is good on a clean, straight scan and weaker on handwriting, stamps, and faint photocopies, so read the result through before you rely on it.

Pages and line breaks#

Each page of the PDF starts a new page in Word by default, so a passage on page 12 of the PDF is on page 12 of the document, and a page with no text becomes a blank page rather than shifting the rest. Untick Start each PDF page on a new page for one continuous document, which suits a report you are going to edit heavily.

A PDF breaks a line wherever its column ran out, and those breaks mean nothing in Word, so the tool joins them. A word split with a hyphen at the end of a line is joined without a space. Where the breaks carry meaning, as in an address, a list, or a poem, tick Keep the PDF’s line breaks and each line stays on its own line.

The Word file is laid out on A4 pages with 2.54 cm margins. For US Letter, change the paper size in Word’s Layout tab, and the text flows onto the new pages by itself.