Methods to Convert PDF to Word and Word to PDF

Users would like to see everything in the software industry standardized. Alas, unification is lame even with regard to technical standards, and even more intense competition reigns in software. The strong survive, and there are two universally recognized formats in document creation: PDF by Adobe Systems and DOCX from Microsoft. End users can receive texts in both formats, and in this regard, it often becomes necessary to convert them to each other, since they are incompatible with each other. Read below how to solve this problem.

How to make a Word document from a PDF file

The peculiarity of the PDF format is that such documents are extremely good for creating materials for printing purposes (presentations, books, reports, magazines). In electronic form, of course. The format allows you to preserve both the structure of the document and the fonts used (included in the Acrobat Reader package). Such documents are compact in size, which allows you to send files both by e-mail and in instant messengers. But such files are very poorly suitable for editing, so if there is a need to make changes to the text, you will have to convert it to a format native to MS Word. This can be done in several ways.

Convert PDF to Word format with Adobe Acrobat Reader

Yes, a software product that specializes in reading PDF files can convert them to a competitive format. To do this, you need to open the source file, select the “Edit” item in the main menu and use the “Copy file to clipboard” directive. Now you need to open Word and just paste the copied text using a combination or right-click with the “Paste” option selected.

If you only need to edit a piece of text, select it and do the same (copy it to the clipboard and paste it into Word).

Unfortunately, copying PDF text into Word is a method that has a serious drawback: when copying, the original formatting of the document will be lost, the text will be inserted in the same font and style, and it will need to be rendered in the proper form manually.

Adobe Systems has another tool that allows you to do the conversion “correctly”. This is Adobe Acrobat Pro, a program for editing, importing and exporting PDF files to other formats, including the Word format with preservation of formatting. The program is shareware, unlike Reader.

To convert, we follow the algorithm:

• open the source file;
• in the main menu, select “File”, click on the “Save as” sub-item and for the “File type” parameter, select the “Word” option. After clicking the “Save” button, the process of converting the document starts.

Other third-party programs provide the ability to convert PDF to Word format:

• UniPDF.
  

  UniPDF

• FirstPDF.
  

  FirstPDF

• PDFtoWord.
  

  PDFtoWord Converter

• VeryPDF.
  

  VeryPDF

• Nitro Pro.
  

  Nitro Pro

All of them require installation, but the conversion process itself is not complicated and is also performed in a few clicks.

Online services

Many users, for various reasons, prefer to use the corresponding online services to install third-party programs. There are some that specialize in converting PDF files to Word.

One of the most popular resources for this orientation is pdf2doc.com. Its services are completely free, and the service provides the ability to convert twenty PDF files at the same time. Among the target formats, the main ones are DOC / DOCX, which, in fact, is reflected in the domain name.

The service interface is so simple that a primary school student can figure it out. How does the conversion work:

• go to the site;
• in the top menu, click the “PDF to doc” button (if necessary – next to the “PDF to docx”);
  

  Choosing the direction of PDF2Doc conversion

• a small window will open in which you will be asked to download the source file from your computer, specifying the full path to it;
• after the conversion is completed, you must save the result by clicking the “Load” button and specifying the path to save the document.

Conversion time can range from a few seconds to minutes – the process is influenced by both the file size and the complexity of its structure.

Be sure to try another popular service – Smallpdf. This site is characterized by a pleasant design, its feature is the textual accompaniment of the commands being executed. Conversion to the Word format is carried out according to the same scenario, but the average conversion time is noticeably shorter here. It is also worth noting that all temporary files are stored on the server for only an hour, after which they are deleted.

Other free web resources that provide a PDF to Word translation service for editing documents include:

• go4convert;
• convertio;
• convertonlinefree;
• pdftoword.

Using Google Drive to Convert PDF to DOCX

The only requirement to use this method is to have a Google account. Conversion in this service is carried out as follows:

• we type google.com in the address bar;
• click on the icon depicting nine squares (located in the upper right corner of the page);
  

  Button with a miniature of nine squares

• in the window that opens, click on the “Google Drive” icon;
  
• upload a PDF document to disk;
• as soon as it appears in the list of uploaded files, right-click on it and select the option “Open with”, and in the submenu select “Google Docs”;
• as soon as the conversion is over, select the “File” item in the top menu, then “Download” and select Microsoft Word from the format menu.
  

On the main screen of the service, a file with the same name will appear next to the PDF document. By clicking RMB, it can also be downloaded without specifying the format – the service itself converts it to DOCX.

As with Acrobat Reader, formatting will be lost during conversion, and this is the main disadvantage of this method.

OCR software for PDF text

It is not always possible to transform a PDF document into other formats. The most common case is scanned documents that are graphic files. However, the author of the document can protect it from editing by making it read-only. In such cases, if you want to open a PDF file and convert it to Word to make changes to the text, the only way to do this is to use a special program that can recognize the text.

The most popular version of such software is ABBYY FineReader. Download the program, open the source file, start the recognition process, the progress of which is displayed in one of the program windows. As a result, you will receive a text document that you can already edit, add text fragments and perform other operations.

Ways to Convert Word to PDF

Sometimes it becomes necessary to convert it backwards – for example, if you have created a Word document, but are not sure that the recipient to whom you are sending it has a version of Word that is the same or newer. If it is not, chances are high that it will not be able to open the document, or formatting will be lost when it is opened. Converting to PDF will solve the problem of incompatibility – it is sure to be read on any computer.

Let’s consider the most common ways of how to make a PDF document from a Word file.

Via Microsoft Office suite

If you work fruitfully with the Microsoft Word editor, then you know that the typed document can be saved in different formats. There is also PDF in the list of available ones. The procedure for saving a Word document in PDF format requires the following steps:

• open the text to be converted;
• click on the “File” item in the main menu of the program;
  
• select the submenu “Save as”;
  
• indicate in which folder to save the final file;
• click on the option “file type” and select the PDF format from the list.
  

As you can see, the procedure is extremely simple and very fast.

Use of online services

The first method does not always show satisfactory results. If you are having trouble, try saving the Word file in PDF format using specialized sites. There are a huge number of such services on the Internet, but we recommend using only those that are present at the top of the search results – it is in the TOP-10 that time-tested resources are located. Otherwise, you may encounter limited functionality, a crooked conversion, or even a dubious resource.

If we talk about free services with a Russian-language interface, we can recommend the following sites:

• pdf2go.com/ru;
• smallpdf.com/ru;
• pdf.io/ru.

The last resource is the easiest to use. It is characterized by a minimalistic interface consisting of a single button, while the functionality of the program is not bad. For example, you can upload a document from a local drive, or from well-known cloud services such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

The conversion algorithm is as follows:

• go to the site;
• click on the “Word to PDF” icon;
  
• we press the notorious single button;
  
• specify the path to the source file;
• click “Open”;
• the conversion procedure will start, after which the “Download” button will appear;
• click it, by default the PDF file will be saved in the “Downloads” folder or the directory that you specified in the browser settings.

Small files are converted in seconds, larger documents are converted in minutes.

Third party software

Another popular way to convert Word files to PDF. The number of such utilities is also quite large, we recommend using the Smallpdf program. It is completely free, takes up little disk space, can perform reverse transformations, has a friendly, intuitive interface even for beginners.

With such a program, you will not need Internet access, except for the download procedure.

The conversion algorithm is as follows:

• run the utility;
• in the left part of the program window, click the “Office to PDF” button;
• select the format of the source file;
  
• click on the “File” menu item, select the “Open” option (the same result is possible by selecting the “Choose Files” tab located in the central block);
• specify the path to the Word document, press “Select”;
• press the button “Convert file”.

The conversion process is very fast, the resulting file will be saved in the same directory as the original one.

Converting via Google Drive

The final way to turn a Word document into a PDf file is a cloud service from Google. To use it, you must have a registered account. The conversion is not as fast as when using the software installed on your computer, but it is unlikely to take longer than 2 minutes.

Algorithm for reworking the file:

• go to the search engine;
• click in the upper right corner of the square, select the service “Google Drive”;
• click on the “Create” button in the left block of the window;
  
• select the item “Upload files”, add the source file;
  
• click on the item “Open in the application” (available at the top of the window);
  
• click “File” in the top menu, select the “Download as” option, note that we want to save the file as a “PDF Document”.

As you can see, almost all methods of converting one format to another are suitable for the reverse conversion. You just have to choose a method that suits you in terms of conversion quality.