PDF to Word

How do I convert a PDF to Word?

Press Choose a PDF, keep Layout on Editable for a normal Word document, and press Convert to Word. When it finishes, press Download and open the .docx file in Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice. Choose Keep layout instead if the document must look as close to the PDF as possible.

1. Press Choose a PDF.
2. Pick a Layout: Editable or Keep layout.
3. If the PDF has scanned pages, leave Recognize text in scanned pages (OCR) on and pick the language.
4. Press Convert to Word, then Download the .docx file.

Editable or Keep layout: which should I choose?

Choose Editable to change the text: you get normal Word paragraphs that reflow, real headings for the navigation pane, lists and tables. Choose Keep layout when the look matters more than editing, such as a flyer: each paragraph sits in a box at its exact place, so editing one can overlap another.

What does the converter find in my PDF?

A PDF stores letters at positions, not paragraphs or tables, so the tool rebuilds them. This table shows what it found in our test documents, converted with the tool. Check tables and multi-column pages after converting, since unusual layouts can still need tidying.

Measured on 2026-10-12 in Chrome 152 on an i5-8350U laptop.

How do I convert a scanned PDF to Word?

Choose the scanned PDF above and leave Recognize text in scanned pages (OCR) on. The tool finds pages that are only pictures, reads their words with Tesseract on your device, measures font sizes, bold and ruled lines, and writes a Word file with editable text, tables, and the page's logos or photos in place.

1. Press Choose a PDF and pick the scan. The file card says how many pages have no text, only a picture.
2. Leave Recognize text in scanned pages (OCR) ticked and pick the Language of the scanned text.
3. Press Convert to Word. Each scanned page shows its progress; press Stop to cancel.
4. Download the .docx file and check names, numbers and tables against the scan.

What a scanned page keeps

• Page size, margins, columns and reading order, rebuilt the same way as for a PDF with real text.
• Paragraphs, line breaks, headings and lists, with bullets read as Word bullets.
• Font sizes, measured from the height of capitals and tall letters above each line's baseline.
• Bold and italic, from stroke width and letter slant, and text color when it is clearly not black.
• Alignment: left, centered, right or justified.
• Tables drawn with lines, as Word tables with each word in its cell.
• Logos, photos, signatures and stamps, cropped from the scan and placed as pictures.
• Tilted scans, straightened before reading.

What it cannot keep

• The exact font. A picture of text does not say which font it used, so text is set in Arial, Times New Roman or Courier New, whichever the letter shapes are closest to. Sizes are measured so letters come out as tall as on the scan.
• Handwriting is not read. A signature stays a picture.
• Decorative and script fonts often come back with wrong letters, or as a picture.
• Low-resolution scans lose small text. The Tesseract guide to improving output quality says the engine works best at 300 dpi or more.
• Shaded table cells come back without their shading.

How accurate is it?

We drew 2 text PDFs from our test files as page pictures at 200 dpi, tilted the first page, blurred them and saved them as JPEG, like a cheap scanner does. Then we converted each scan and its original and compared the two Word documents word by word. We also scanned a letter with a logo and a signature, and a page with a ruled table.

Across the scans, at least 99.3% of the words came back in the right order. On the two reports, 100% of the matched words had a font size within 10% of the original (average error 2.9% and 5.9%), and bold matched on 99.6% or more of the words. Reading took 9.3 to 14.7 seconds a page.

Measured on 2026-10-17 in Chrome 155 on an i5-8350U laptop, with the same English reading data the tool downloads.

How do I convert a PDF to Google Docs?

Google Drive can open a PDF straight in Google Docs: right-click it in Drive and choose Open with, then Google Docs. Google says lists, tables and columns may not carry over that way. To keep them, convert the PDF to .docx here first, then upload the Word file to Drive and open it in Google Docs.

Open the PDF in Google Docs from Drive

1. On a computer, go to Google Drive and upload the PDF with New, then File upload.
2. Right-click the PDF.
3. Click Open with, then Google Docs.

Drive reads the PDF with text recognition and gives you a new Google Doc. Its help page on converting PDF and photo files to text says bold, italics, font size, font type and line breaks are likely kept, while lists, tables, columns, footnotes and endnotes are likely lost. It also suggests files of 2 MB or smaller, upright pages, text at least 10 pixels high and common fonts such as Arial or Times New Roman.

Convert to Word first, then open the .docx in Google Docs

1. Convert the PDF with the tool above, with Layout on Editable, and download the .docx file.
2. In Google Drive, press New, then File upload, and pick the .docx file.
3. Double-click the file in Drive to open it in Google Docs.

Google explains editing Word files in Docs, and which features are not supported, in Work with Office files. Either way the document ends up in your Google Drive; this route only keeps the PDF conversion on your device.