How to convert a PDF to Word without ruining your formatting

Converting a PDF into a word document isn’t a particularly unusual task. Since Word offers a wider range of editing and customization options than a PDF file, there are lots of reasons you might find yourself needing a reliable PDF to Word converter—for instance, if you need to update the look and feel of a PDF, or share it with collaborators for further rounds of edits.

Unfortunately, getting your document into a clean, editable file it isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Anybody who has tried to carry out this seemingly simple task will know how easy it is to completely ruin your document in the process, messing up the document style and ending up with an unusable result.

To help out, we’re taking a look at how you can use Adobe Acrobat to convert your PDF to Word without losing formatting in the process.

Adobe Acrobat: at Adobe

Adobe Acrobat offers a range of tools to create, edit, and collaborate on PDFs - including the ability to convert PDF to Word documents without altering the formatting on the page. You can check out all productivity tools by clicking here.

Getting started

We signed up for a free trial of Acrobat Pro, to give us full access to the features that might come in handy while playing with our PDF documents. However, this isn’t strictly necessary—in fact, opening up an Incognito browser window, we were able to verify that it’s possible to access Adobe’s free PDF to word converter without even needing to sign up for an account.

This means that getting started is as simple as navigating to the acrobat.adobe.com/tools/pdf-to-word landing page. Alternatively, open up Acrobat and sign in to your account.

Using the correct tool

The key to converting your document without losing the formatting and style settings is choosing a tool that’s up to the job. While simply searching for ‘free PDF to word converter’ may bring up lots of possible options, the truth is that many of these are basic programs that lack the full functionality needed to convert your document cleanly.

More worryingly, there are seemingly hundreds of document conversion websites that are created by unknown companies that will quickly start asking for personal details such as your email address before letting you download your file.

These sites are not particularly reliable, and you don’t know whether the results will be high enough quality until you’ve already shared your information. This is why we prefer to use a trusted tool from a well-known company.

Preserving your document’s key elements

Once you’ve navigated to the Adobe Acrobat PDF tool, getting your new document is as simple as uploading the PDF file and hitting the ‘Convert to DOCX’ button. You can then either download your document or edit it using Microsoft Word for the web.

If you’re signed in to your Adobe account then it will also be saved in the ‘your documents’ area, making it easy to access the document again at a later date should you need to.

We were keen to put the tool through its paces, so we chose a document with plenty of style and formatting to see how well Adobe Acrobat lived up to the task. Happily, the results left us with no cause for complaint, as all of the following transferred perfectly over to the new word document:

• Fonts and font colours
• Image placement (including header and footer images)
• Contents section
• Page numbers
• Text boxes
• Bullet points
• Tables

These elements didn’t just look correct; they were all fully editable within the converted document.

Converting scanned PDFs into editable documents

One particular use case for converting PDFs to word is the ability to work with scanned documents. This can be a little more complex, as a scanned PDF will often be made up of images of text—it won’t have been originally designed as an editable document.

The solution to this is Optimal Character Recognition (OCR), a feature that Adobe offers as part of its Acrobat conversion tool. OCR technology identifies the characters from within an image and then can turn those characters into machine-readable text. This allows it to be converted into a word document, or whatever other format you may require.

However, getting good results from this technology can rely on the quality of the original scan. If you’re intending to turn scanned documents into editable Word files, make sure the scan quality is as crisp and clear as possible: blurred images may not provide reliable results.

Final tips

Hopefully the steps above will give you everything you need to convert your PDF file into a fully editable Word document without any issues. Here are a few final tips and tricks to consider:

• Check your document carefully once you’re finished. Even a well-converted file could contain small anomalies such as misplaced images or font changes, so make sure you give it a full review. In particular, check to make sure any complicated formatting, such as multi-column text or complex tables, has been preserved.
• Keep the original PDF. It’s never a bad idea to keep hold of older files for version control, and keeping the original PDF means you’ll always have something to refer back to. Just make sure your different versions are clearly labelled.
• Protect sensitive and confidential information. We chose to use Adobe because it’s a trusted platform—you should avoid uploading sensitive documents to unfamiliar online PDF converters, and check how your chosen tool handles uploaded files. Adobe states that "Your file will be securely handled by Adobe servers and deleted unless you sign in to save it."