Well, you can try saving it as a word doc & if you are lucky, you can play around with it or yank your hair out trying, lol or save it as text, then copy to Word & format the whole doc to your liking. PDF's are meant to be as is with no changes.
Posted by: Maria at July 23, 2010 7:22 PM
@Maria. The only way you can save a pdf document as a Word file is if you have a program such as Adobe Acrobat or Foxit Pro. Adobe & Foxit Readers can't do that. An OCR program can, but the output would need a bit of work to get it formatted like the original. You can select, copy and paste the data into Word that you want to copy, but often the layout will be so weird it would take a long time to fix up. One of the best OCR programs I've found for preserving layout is FineReader but the Word document it produces can sometimes be very hard to edit properly.
Posted by: Mark Jacobs at July 24, 2010 2:03 AM
I find this site does a superb job at converting PDF files to Word:
http://www.scannedpdftoword.com/
I thought one of the purposes of PDF was security. Rather than send an editable Word or Excel document via email, some people deliberately convert to PDF so that the recipient cannot tamper with it.
In the work environment we sometimes pull up reports from our accounting program, save them as PDFs, then use a program called Able2Extract to convert them to Excel spreadsheets if we want to work with the information. There's an option for Word conversions as well.
Posted by: Tony at July 25, 2010 9:59 PM
Yet another PDF converter:
I've had pretty good results with , even for relatively complex documents.
Posted by: Jonathan V. at July 26, 2010 9:30 AM
Link didn't come through on my last comment:
http://www.pdftoword.com/
Posted by: Jonathan V. at July 26, 2010 9:31 AM
The best PDF to Word converter, which I use every day, is ABBYY PDF Transformer. It will produce a Word document that exactly matches the original PDF, once you get to know how to use it. Unfortunately, its a professional tool and is not cheap (about $100).
Posted by: John at July 27, 2010 8:28 AM
My major problem with PDF conversions is that I am subject to notification mandates from the local federal court, and the list of people to be notifed are furnished to me in PDF format. The PDFs are supposed to be compatible with Avery labels, but they seldom are. I need to convert documents that I did not originate in order to generate mailing labels. So far the only way I have found to do this is the old fashioned manual keyboard.
Posted by: Douglas Johnson at July 27, 2010 11:08 AM
Gmail just added the ability to convert pdf to doc when uploading to docs. Have not tried it myself, but since it's google I have the feeling it'll not be too bad.
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Well, you can try saving it as a word doc & if you are lucky, you can play around with it or yank your hair out trying, lol or save it as text, then copy to Word & format the whole doc to your liking. PDF's are meant to be as is with no changes.
Posted by: Maria at July 23, 2010 7:22 PM@Maria. The only way you can save a pdf document as a Word file is if you have a program such as Adobe Acrobat or Foxit Pro. Adobe & Foxit Readers can't do that. An OCR program can, but the output would need a bit of work to get it formatted like the original. You can select, copy and paste the data into Word that you want to copy, but often the layout will be so weird it would take a long time to fix up. One of the best OCR programs I've found for preserving layout is FineReader but the Word document it produces can sometimes be very hard to edit properly.
Posted by: Mark Jacobs at July 24, 2010 2:03 AMI find this site does a superb job at converting PDF files to Word:
Posted by: The Dr. at July 24, 2010 6:50 AMhttp://www.scannedpdftoword.com/
One more free PDF to Word converter.
http://www.pdfonline.com/pdf2word/index.asp
Posted by: Mary at July 25, 2010 9:46 PMI thought one of the purposes of PDF was security. Rather than send an editable Word or Excel document via email, some people deliberately convert to PDF so that the recipient cannot tamper with it.
In the work environment we sometimes pull up reports from our accounting program, save them as PDFs, then use a program called Able2Extract to convert them to Excel spreadsheets if we want to work with the information. There's an option for Word conversions as well.
Posted by: Tony at July 25, 2010 9:59 PMYet another PDF converter:
Posted by: Jonathan V. at July 26, 2010 9:30 AMI've had pretty good results with , even for relatively complex documents.
Link didn't come through on my last comment:
Posted by: Jonathan V. at July 26, 2010 9:31 AMhttp://www.pdftoword.com/
The best PDF to Word converter, which I use every day, is ABBYY PDF Transformer. It will produce a Word document that exactly matches the original PDF, once you get to know how to use it. Unfortunately, its a professional tool and is not cheap (about $100).
Posted by: John at July 27, 2010 8:28 AMMy major problem with PDF conversions is that I am subject to notification mandates from the local federal court, and the list of people to be notifed are furnished to me in PDF format. The PDFs are supposed to be compatible with Avery labels, but they seldom are. I need to convert documents that I did not originate in order to generate mailing labels. So far the only way I have found to do this is the old fashioned manual keyboard.
Posted by: Douglas Johnson at July 27, 2010 11:08 AMGmail just added the ability to convert pdf to doc when uploading to docs. Have not tried it myself, but since it's google I have the feeling it'll not be too bad.
Posted by: Tim at July 27, 2010 12:04 PMTo post a comment on "How do I convert a PDF document into a Word document?", please return to that article's main page.