PDF to Word Converter

Convert PDF to Word without uploading the file

This PDF to Word converter turns a PDF into a .docx document that you can edit in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer or Pages. The PDF is read by your browser and the Word file is built on your device, so the document is never sent to a server. That matters for contracts, CVs, invoices and anything else you would rather keep to yourself.

A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores pieces of text at exact positions on a page, plus pictures and lines. Getting an editable document back means working out which pieces belong together. The converter does that analysis page by page and writes a standard Office Open XML file with real Word styles, lists and tables.

Two ways to convert

Editable text

• Lines and paragraphs: text on the same baseline is joined from left to right, with spaces taken from the gaps. Lines are merged into paragraphs using the spacing between them, first-line indents and sentence endings. A word split with a hyphen at the end of a line is joined again.
• Headings: text clearly larger than the body text becomes Heading 1, 2 or 3, ranked by size, so the Navigation pane and a table of contents work straight away.
• Bold, italic and fonts: taken from the font names in the PDF, together with sizes, superscripts and subscripts. Text colour is not copied.
• Lists: lines starting with •, –, 1., 2), (a) or ii. become real Word bullet and numbered lists, nested by indent. A list that starts at 4 keeps starting at 4.
• Tables: tables drawn with borders become Word tables, including merged cells. Columns of text without borders stay as tab-separated lines with tab stops, so they still line up.
• Columns: a page with two columns of text is read down the left column first, then the right one.
• Images: placed where they appear on the page, at the size they are shown. Most photos stored as JPEG are copied into the document unchanged.
• Links and page furniture: web links stay clickable. Headers, footers and page numbers repeated on every page are left out by default, so a paragraph that continues on the next page is not cut in two.

Exact layout

Each page is drawn as an image and placed on its own page in the Word file, with the same page size and no margins. Choose it when the document must look exactly like the original, for example a designed flyer, and you only need to add notes or print it from Word.

Example

On the PDF page                      In the Word document
Introduction        (16 pt, bold)    Heading 2: Introduction
Sales grew in every re-              One paragraph: "Sales grew in
gion this year.                      every region this year."
•   Faster delivery                  Bulleted list item: Faster delivery

What converts well, and what does not

Documents written in a word processor and saved as PDF convert best: reports, letters, contracts, CVs, manuals and articles. Expect to tidy up:

• Magazine-style layouts with text boxes, captions over pictures or more than two columns.
• Tables without borders, and charts drawn as shapes (shapes are not copied).
• Forms: the boxes and fields of fillable forms are not converted.
• Footnotes, which come out as ordinary paragraphs where they sit on the page.
• Fonts you do not have installed: Word shows a similar font instead.

Scanned PDFs are photos of paper and have no text to convert. The converter tells you which pages look scanned and places their images in the document; reading the words from a scan needs OCR (optical character recognition), for example with Image to Text. If you only need the plain words of a text PDF, PDF to Text is quicker, and PDF to JPG saves pages as images.

Privacy and large files

Pages are processed one at a time with a progress bar and a Cancel button, so long documents work without freezing the tab. Use a page range to convert just the part you need. Password-protected PDFs ask for the password, which is used only in your browser; you can also remove it first with Unlock PDF.