The short answer
Drop the PDF into the converter below. Leave Start each PDF page on a new page on if you want the page structure of the original, or turn it off to get one continuous document that is easier to edit. Leave out headers, footers and page numbers is on by default, so the repeated lines at the top and bottom of every page do not end up in the middle of your text. Press Download and open the DOCX file in any word processor.
If the result contains only pictures of the pages, the PDF is a scan. Run it through OCR PDF first, then convert the new file here.
Try it here: PDF to Word
Open the full tool pageWhy converting a PDF is harder than it looks
A Word document knows about paragraphs, headings and tables. A PDF does not. It is closer to a print-out: it stores every piece of text with an exact position, a font and a size, and nothing more. There is no marker that says where a paragraph ends, which line is a heading or which words belong to the same table cell.
A converter therefore has to read the page the way a person would. This converter looks at the position, font and size of every piece of text. Lines with the same spacing are joined into paragraphs, a short line followed by a gap ends a paragraph, words split with a hyphen at the end of a line are joined again, and text that is clearly larger than the body text becomes a heading. Bold and italic are taken from the font names stored in the PDF, which is why they survive even though the PDF has no idea what bold means.
What converts well and what needs a touch-up
- Converts well: running text, headings, bold and italic, font names and sizes, bullet lists, numbered lists, links, images placed in the flow of the text, simple tables with clear rows and columns, page size and margins.
- Converts with small differences: lines with text on the left and right (a name and a date, a label and a price) become a paragraph with tab stops; spacing between paragraphs is approximated.
- Needs a touch-up: text colors (the text comes out black), multi-column layouts, text boxes, tables with merged cells or long text inside cells, footnotes, and charts drawn with lines rather than images.
- Does not come across: form fields, comments and annotations, and the exact positions of decorative elements.
Scanned PDFs need OCR first
A PDF made with a scanner, a copier or a phone scanning app holds a photo of every page. There are no letters in it, only pixels. Converting such a file gives you a Word document with one image per page, and the converter tells you how many pages were scans.
To get editable text, add a text layer with OCR (optical character recognition). Open OCR PDF, choose the language of the document and run it. The result is a searchable PDF, which you can then convert to Word here. Check names and numbers after OCR: recognition is good on clean scans but makes mistakes on blurry photos, small print and handwriting.
A quick test tells you which kind of PDF you have: press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) in your PDF reader and search for a word you can see. If it is found, the PDF has real text.
Quick fixes after converting
- Fonts look different: the document asks for the fonts used in the PDF. If your computer does not have them, Word substitutes a similar font. Select all text (Ctrl+A) and pick one font if you want a uniform look.
- Text runs onto extra pages: with Start each PDF page on a new page turned on, a page that is slightly longer in Word spills over. Convert again with the option off, or reduce the font size or spacing a little.
- Headings: the converter marks larger text as Heading 1, 2 or 3, so the navigation pane and an automatic table of contents work straight away. Adjust a heading level with the Styles gallery if needed.
- Tables: if a table came out as tab-separated lines, select those lines and use Insert > Table > Convert Text to Table in Word.
- Colors: the converter does not carry over text colors, so recolor headings or highlights where they matter.
Other ways to convert, and when to use them
Microsoft Word can open a PDF directly (File > Open). It reflows the content and often keeps more of the visual layout, but it can take a while on long files and sometimes turns pages into many text boxes. Google Docs can also open a PDF from Google Drive (Open with > Google Docs) and runs OCR on scans, but it drops most images and formatting. Paid editors keep complex layouts best.
The converter on this page works in your browser without uploading the file, handles many PDFs at once and gives you a clean document that is easy to edit, which is usually what you want when you need to change the text rather than reproduce the design.