Convert PDF files to editable Word documents with this amazing software! You will be able to convert any file with ease. Converting a full set of scanned books or files will now be as simple as when you were back in school. With searchable text and bookmarks, you will have an amazing experience converting PDF files. Convert PDF files to Word documents and then modify and edit them quickly and easily!
The pdf to word converter software is the best free solution to batch convert pdf files into editable word document (doc, docx) files. Select PDF files to convert and the output profile, then click Convert button, more than a hundred pdf files can be converted in batch in seconds.
The only way to make wholesale edits in a PDF file is to transform it into a word-processing document so that you can edit it in Word, Google Docs, or any other word-processing app. What makes it difficult is that the PDF (Portable Document Format) standard, an open standard created by Adobe in the 1990s, is completely incompatible with the DOCX word-processing format that’s now standard in Microsoft Word and almost everything else. Don’t believe any vendor who claims to make PDF editing as easy as it is in Word. That kind of editing is simply impossible in a PDF file. You have to convert the PDF to a different kind of document first.
There’s no perfect solution to this problem, but there are plenty of good-enough solutions. Which solution you should use depends on the kind of PDF that you need to edit. If the PDF was created from a Windows, Mac, or Linux app by exporting from the app to PDF, then the solution is relatively easy because the text of the PDF is embedded in the PDF file and can be extracted. However, if the PDF was created by scanning or photographing printed text, then the problem is a lot harder, because you need to use OCR (optical character recognition) on the scanned image to extract the text, and that process always risks introducing errors.
How to Tell if a PDF Is App-Created or Scanned?
If you don’t know whether a PDF was created by an app or by a camera or scanner, here’s how to find out.
Open the PDF in your default PDF app, such as Edge in Windows 11, Preview in macOS, or Adobe Acrobat Reader. Try to select some text by dragging with the mouse. If you can select text, then the PDF was exported from an app—or it has already had OCR applied to it, which is just as good. If you can’t select text, then the PDF is scanned and needs to have OCR applied before you can convert it into a Word document.
How to Convert PDFs With Embedded Text Using Word
Let’s start with PDFs that don’t need OCR, in other words, PDFs with embedded text. The simplest way to convert your PDF is to open it in Microsoft Word and let Word convert the content.
Open it as you would any other file in Word. Launch Word and go to File > Open and select your PDF. Or right-click on the file and select Open With > Microsoft Word. The file will likely take a moment to process and then open as an editable Word document.
This solution works reasonably well, but the content probably won’t look exactly right. The content in a PDFs is “fixed” in one position on the page, and the PDF doesn’t let you insert or remove paragraphs while preserving the flow of the document as you can in a word-processor.
Here’s a list from Microsoft of what may not convert just right:
- tables with cell spacing
- page colors and page borders
- tracked changes
- frames
- footnotes that span more than one page
- endnotes
- audio, video, and PDF active elements
- PDF bookmarks
- PDF tags
- PDF comments
- font effects, like Glow or Shadow (in the Word file, the effects are represented by graphics)
When you open a PDF in Word, you may see a warning:
“Word will now convert your PDF to an editable Word document,” it says. “This may take a while. The resulting Word document will be optimized to allow you to edit the text, so it might not look exactly like the original PDF, especially if the original file contained a lot of graphics.”
That said, the graphics will get pulled in, but they may not be exactly where you want them. And your text may end up in text boxes rather than freely flowing through the page. But at least you’ll have a document that you can work with.
If you want to export it as a PDF when you’re done editing, simply use Word’s Export or Save As menus, and export your document to PDF format.
By the way, this conversion works not only in the Word desktop app but also in the free web app version of Word (found at office.com). You open a PDF in Word Online and it’s viewable, but click the “Edit in Word” link and you may see a file conversion warning:
It’s followed by another warning about changes to the layout, etc. But the content will be there and editable, even if the look went wonky. Give it a try.
Acrobat, Adobe’s PDF Converter, and Google Docs Methods
Opening a PDF in Word is only one way to convert PDF files to DOCX format. You may get better results by using PDF-editing apps like Adobe Acrobat DC. In my experience, Acrobat does a better job than anything else of exporting PDFs to Word format.
Open the PDF in Acrobat, choose File/Export To… from the menu, and export to Word format. Acrobat does a far better job than Word at sorting out page formatting like headers and footers. Word sometimes mixes up the text in the header with the text of the document, but Acrobat almost always gets it right.
The trouble with Acrobat is that it costs money—but Adobe offers a free online PDF converter that you can use to get the same results you get from Acrobat.
You can find cheaper PDF software that convert app-created PDFs to DOCX format, but I haven’t found any that do it as well as Acrobat.
Dozens of other free online PDF conversion sites promise to spit out editable text, but I don’t recommend any of them as a place to trust uploading your data. Adobe, however, is well-established enough for me to trust it with ordinary documents, though I won’t upload anything that I seriously need to keep secret.
One more free app that I sometimes hear recommended for converting a PDF to Word is Google Docs. The instructions are similar to using Acrobat: Open the file for editing, and then download it in Word format. Every time I’ve tried it, though, the results were terrible. Your luck may be better.
How to Convert a Scanned Document to Word Format
Everything I’ve written so far focuses on PDFs that were exported from an app so that the text is embedded in the PDF. What can you do about converting PDFs made from a scanner or camera?
Depending on the quality of the scanned image, you may be able to open it in Word, and Word’s built-in OCR may be able to create editable text. I’ve had success with clear single-page images, but Word simply can’t handle anything complex, like a scan of a book, and tends to produce an unusable mix of text and images.
In converting scanned images to editable text, Acrobat does a decent job of creating a PDF, but nothing comes close to the power of our Editors’ Choice winner for OCR tools, ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 ($199). FineReader’s OCR engine is more accurate than anything else I’ve tried, and it comes with a unique error-checking feature that works like a spellchecker in a word processor, so you can fix OCR errors before exporting the result. FineReader exports the results in Word, PDF, and other formats, and the resulting files are far more usable than anything else I’ve found.
If you still have the original document that was scanned or turned into an image file, you can use a mobile scanning app with OCR to capture and extract the text.
Soda PDF
Best for Simple PDF Processing.
Soda PDF is a phenomenal premium PDF processing tool for everything from conversion to PDF compression. The tool offers a colorful interface that makes the conversion, compression, and other PDF-related tasks very easy.
The tool is very powerful and gets your file converted at ultrafast speed with no compromise in quality. It does require you to pay a premium amount, but it is absolutely worth it when you consider what’s in store.
Price: $6 per month for standard, $10 per month for pro, $16 for business.
Website: Soda PDF
EasePDF Online Converter
EasePDF is another trusted online PDF solution provider. This platform runs online, so you just need a reliable web browser for accessing it, supporting any devices with different systems, including Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, etc.
EasePDF provides a range of easy-to-handle tools with a PDF Converter enabling you to convert PDF documents to and from different file formats, as well as a PDF Editor, allowing you to edit, rotate and sign PDFs. You can also organize your PDF documents’ layout by merging, splitting, compressing, cropping, as well as protect your PDFs with passwords.
If you’re happy to upload your PDF documents online, EasePDF is a good choice due to its speed, availability on multiple platforms, free trial version, and is competitively priced at $39.95/year for the premium plan.
Summary (EasePDF Online PDF Converter):
User-friendly UI
Choice of PDF converters
Cloud platform connection
Free Trial
Online
How to Convert PDF with Adobe Converter Alternative on Mac
There are many tools which are capable of converting PDF files in different formats. PDFelement Pro is one of the best tools, to consider as Adobe converter alternative. It will allow you to convert PDF documents on Windows and Mac devices in the easiest way possible. You will be able to control your documents more than Adobe Acrobat PDF converter and Adobe Acrobat PDF converter alternatives. Here is how to convert PDF with the best Adobe converter alternative on Mac:
Step 1. Open PDF File
First of all, you have to launch the Adobe converter alternative for Mac. After the downloading and installation process completes, go to the ‘Open File‘ from the menu.
Step 2. Edit PDF
There is an advanced feature available in the Adobe converter alternative, which allows you to edit PDF before converting which is completely optional. To edit a PDF file then click on the ‘Text‘ button from the left toolbar and then choose the Pages option to edit the pages.
Step 3. Convert PDF
It is easy for your to convert PDF file using the Adobe converter alternative. Go to ‘Tool‘ > ‘Batch Process‘, and choose the first tool ‘PDF Converter‘. With this Adobe converter alternative tool, you can convert PDF in the various MS-Office formats. Click on ‘Add‘ and you can choose to ‘Add Files‘, ‘Add Folder‘, ‘Add Open Files‘. After chosen PDF files, click ‘Apply‘ to begin converting progress.
Moreover, if you have any scanned document or image-based document, then you can turn on ‘OCR Setting‘ feature which is enable you to choose ‘Document Language‘, ‘Downsample To‘ and ‘OCR Range‘.
Conclusion
You have just finished creating invitations, quotation and dozens of other documents using Microsoft Word on Windows or Pages on Mac. Why not share your work with others? How about sending a friend, colleague or family member all the documents you have created without having to send a zillion emails. That’s exactly what you can achieve by converting PDF to editable Word document.
Do you need a reliable solution to convert PDF files to Word? PDF2Office Converter (preview) is an award-winning software developed for business users who encounter the problem of transferring and editing documents in Microsoft Word file format. It is definitely one of the best alternatives to Adobe Acrobat software if you are looking for a practical alternative. The steps for documents conversion is very simple and easy!