PDF to Word

Has your boss asked you to edit the content of a document that you carelessly kept only in PDF format? Don’t panic right away. Now there are many free tools that allow you to transform any document from PDF to Word and edit it freely with Office, LibreOffice and any other software suitable for the purpose.

I’ll tell you more, many of these “tools” work directly online. This means that you don’t need to install any additional software on your computer to use them. You simply have to connect to their home page – using your favorite browser – and upload the documents to be transformed. Now I’ll tell you how.

As for privacy, you can sleep relatively peacefully. All the Web services I am about to tell you about, as well highlighted in their terms of use, automatically delete the files present on their servers within a few hours. This means they are reasonably safe. However, if I were you, I would avoid using them to process documents containing sensitive data or “top secret” information. But this is a concept that we can safely extend to any web service that we don’t have direct control over, not just online converters. Having said that, let’s ban the chatter and therefore went to find out what these tools are to carry out transformations from PDF to Word!

Microsoft Word 2013 (or later)

Starting from version 2013, Microsoft Word supports the direct import of PDF files transforming them into freely editable DOC or DOCX documents. If you have a copy of Office 2013 (or later versions) on your computer then start Word, go to the File  menu  of the program, click on  Open  and select the PDF you want to turn into DOC or DOCX file.

Once this is done, click on the OK button  , wait for the converted version of the document to be displayed on the screen and save it as a Word file by selecting the  Save As item from the File menu  . Easier than that?

CloudConvert

If you are looking for an online tool to convert PDF to Word easily, quickly and having the ability to operate on multiple files at the same time, I recommend you try CloudConvert . It is a “universal” converter that allows the transformation of many different file types. Its upload limit is 100 MB per file but by creating a free account on the site it is possible to raise this limit to 1 GB.

To use it, connect to its home page using the link I indicated earlier and drag the PDFs to be transformed into Word in the browser window. Then, click on the Start conversion button  and wait for the files to be uploaded online first and then converted to DOCX.

When the operation is complete (it should take a few minutes, but it all depends on the speed of your connection and the weight of the document), click on the green Download button  that appears next to the name of each document to download it to your computer.

If you do not want to convert PDF to DOCX but to DOC, before starting the conversion click on the doc menu at the top, select the document item and then the doc item .

Do you want to create a free account on CloudConvert to raise the upload limits of the files to be converted? No problem. Click on the Sign up item  you see at the top right and fill out the form that is proposed to you. Alternatively, click on the Google , Facebook and Twitter buttons and authenticate directly with one of your social accounts.

DocsPal

Another web service for converting PDF to Word “in batch” is DocsPal . The service provides upload limits of 50 MB / file and the sequential conversion of a maximum number of 5 documents at a time.

All you have to do to use it is to connect to its home page via the link I gave you in the previous lines, click on the Browse button and select the files to transform (one at a time).

Then select the DOC format or DOCX format from the drop-down menu that you find in the Convert to item  and click on the Convert button to start the conversion process. Again, the duration of the operation depends on the speed of your connection and the weight of the document to be transformed.

Once the file has been converted, click on its name at the bottom of the page (e.g. document.doc ) to download it to your computer. Very easy, right?

ZamZar

Finally, I want to tell you about ZamZar. You may have already heard of it. It is, in fact, one of the best online conversion services that – like those seen above – allows you to transform documents and multimedia files into numerous different formats. It works directly from the browser on all operating systems. The upload limits of the service are 100 MB per upload (so you can select how many files you want, but they must not exceed 100 MB in weight overall).

To convert a document from PDF to Word with ZamZar, connected to the home page of the service using the link I just provided, click on the Choose files button and select the documents to transform or drag them directly into the green box. Once upload is complete, choose the DOC format or DOCX format from the drop-down menu that you find next to the wording  Step 2  and type your e-mail address in the field located under the item  Step 3 .

Finally, click the Convert button and wait for the ZamZar emails to arrive in your inbox with links to download the converted files to your computer.

PDF to Word with OCR technology

If using the services I have just reported you are unable to convert some of your PDFs, it is probably because you are dealing with documents that have been scanned incorrectly. That is, they were scanned and saved as images rather than text documents.

To overcome this problem you can rely on OCR  (optical character recognition) software , which is able to recognize the writing characters present in the images and transform them into editable texts. Among the best software of this type are  ABBYY FineReader for Windows and  Prizmo  for macOS (both for a fee). I told you about it in my post on  scanning programs .

If you don’t feel like buying and downloading new programs on your computer, you can also contact specific OCR services that can be used directly online as in the case of Free online OCR that extracts text from multipage PDFs and images (JPG, BMP, TIFF, GIF) and converts it to editable Word files as well as Excel and TXT. Converted documents have tables, columns and graphics exactly like the original.