How to convert PDF to Word without losing formatting

Step by step

1. Check what kind of PDF you have. Open it and try to select a line of text with the cursor. If the text highlights, it is a text PDF and will convert well. If the whole page selects as one block, it is a scan and needs OCR first.
2. Open PDF to Word. Go to the PDF to Word tool. Conversion runs in your browser, so a confidential contract or a draft thesis is never uploaded.
3. Drop the PDF in. Drag the file onto the drop zone. Multi-file batches are fine; each becomes its own .docx.
4. Click Convert to Word. Text and paragraph breaks are extracted and written into a .docx. A 30-page report takes a few seconds.
5. Open in Word and tidy. Apply Heading styles to the titles, rebuild any table with Insert Table, and set the page margins. This usually takes less time than retyping a single page.

Why does formatting get lost in the first place?

A PDF is a description of where ink goes on a page: this glyph at these coordinates, this line from here to there, this image in this rectangle. It does not store the idea of a paragraph, a heading, a table or a page margin. Word documents are the opposite: a flow of styled text that the application lays out when you open it. Converting one to the other means guessing structure from position, and every converter guesses differently.

Kilnfile's PDF to Word takes the conservative route. It extracts the text and the paragraph breaks and writes a clean .docx. Complex layouts, tables, fonts and scanned pages are not recreated, which means you get an editable document with no stray text boxes and no mangled columns, rather than a near-copy that falls apart the moment you edit it.

What survives the conversion and what does not?

Survives: body text, paragraph breaks, reading order within single-column pages, and the sequence of pages. Does not survive: fonts (Word substitutes its defaults), bold and italic in most cases, table grids, multi-column layouts, headers and footers as separate regions, images, and anything on a scanned page. Bulleted lists arrive as plain paragraphs starting with a bullet character, which Word's AutoFormat will usually fix when you click into them.

How do I get the best result?

Start from the best source you can find. If you or a colleague have the original Word, Pages or Google Docs file, use that instead; a round trip through PDF always loses something. If the PDF was exported from a text document, you are in good shape. If it is a scan, run it through OCR software first (Kilnfile does not do OCR) so there is a text layer to extract. On a Mac, Preview and the Photos app can recognise text in scans; on Windows, OneNote and the free Microsoft Lens app can.

Single-column documents convert far better than magazine-style layouts. Letters, essays, reports, contracts and policies come out almost ready to use. Brochures, forms and newspaper pages are better rebuilt by hand with the extracted text as a starting point.

What should I fix in Word afterwards?

Work top down. Set the document font and size first, since everything arrives in the default. Then select each heading and apply Heading 1 or Heading 2 from the Styles gallery; this also makes a navigation pane and table of contents possible. Rebuild tables with Insert then Table and paste the values in. Finally, set margins and page size under Layout. For a 20-page report this is typically a ten-minute job.

When is PDF to Text a better choice?

If you only need the words, not a Word document, PDF to Text is faster and gives you plain text to paste anywhere. It has an option for Text with page markers so you can tell where each page began, which is useful for quoting a page number. Use PDF to Word when the destination is Word, Google Docs or Pages and you want paragraphs rather than one long string.

Why not just open the PDF in Word?

You can, and for some files it works well. Word 2013 and later will open a PDF and attempt a reflow, often keeping bold text and simple tables. It struggles with anything scanned, anything with more than one column, and PDFs over a few megabytes, and it needs a desktop copy of Word. The browser route is useful when you are on a Chromebook, a locked-down work machine or a phone, or when the document is sensitive and must not be uploaded to a conversion service.

Frequently asked questions