How to convert a PDF to Word without Office

You don't need Microsoft Office to turn a PDF into a Word document. PDF by Zaweba writes the .docx file itself: open the PDF, choose File > Export > Word document (.docx), and save. The conversion runs on your own PC with the app's own code, so nothing is uploaded and no other program has to be installed.

The result opens in Word if someone you send it to has Word, and in any other word processor that reads .docx files, Write by Zaweba included.

What carries across

A PDF doesn't really know about paragraphs. It stores lines of text at positions on a page. So a good conversion has to rebuild the structure a Word document expects, and that's what the export does.

Lines are joined back into paragraphs, so the text flows and rewraps when you edit it, rather than breaking at the end of every original line. Short lines that are large or all bold become headings, which means a report's section titles arrive as headings you can style and navigate. Pictures stay in place among the text. And page breaks are kept, so each page of the PDF starts a new page in the document.

If you'd rather have Rich Text, File > Export also writes .rtf, which older word processors and many other programs open.

Converting a PDF, start to finish

Open the PDF in PDF by Zaweba. Have a quick look through it first so you know what kind of document it is: mostly running text, a lot of tables, or a heavily designed layout.

Choose File > Export and pick Word document (.docx). Choose a name and folder and save. Then open the new file in your word processor and read it through.

For straightforward documents such as letters, reports, articles and contracts, the text, headings and pictures should be ready to edit. Tidy anything that needs it, and save it as your working copy.

Scans and other awkward PDFs

The one kind of PDF that won't convert usefully is a scan. A scanned page is a picture of text with no real letters inside, so a scan has no text to export until OCR has been done on it. If you open a PDF and can't select any words with the mouse, that's the sign.

Heavily designed pages, like magazine spreads with text in boxes all over the page, convert, but they need more tidying afterwards, because a Word document flows from top to bottom in a way a poster doesn't. For those, ask yourself whether you need the whole layout or just the words. If it's the words, File > Export can also save all the text as a plain .txt file.

Tables are another case. If what you really want is the figures, File > Export > Spreadsheet (.xlsx) puts tables in columns with numbers as numbers, which is often more useful than a table inside a Word file.

Converting, or just editing the PDF

Before converting, it's worth asking whether you need to. If the job is to fix a typo, change a date or update a paragraph, PDF by Zaweba can edit the text in the PDF directly, keeping the original fonts wherever it can. That keeps the look of the document exactly, which a round trip through Word may not.

Convert to Word when the document is going to be reworked properly: rewritten, restructured or reused as the start of something new.

PDF by Zaweba is free software for Windows. It works offline with no account, so contracts, CVs and private letters stay on your computer while they change format.