Thursday, May 01, 2014

Open PDFs with Microsoft Word

Did you know that you can open PDFs in Microsoft Word 2013 for Windows? Just choose File > Open, select a PDF, and you’ll see the following dialog box before the PDF is converted to editable Word text:

ScreenSnapz001

PDFs that have complex layout will change in appearance significantly. If you don’t have the original fonts, they will be automatically be substituted with fonts on your system. In my limited tests, the conversion was far from perfect. But if you are working in Word, and just need to crack open a PDF to copy and paste some text, this could be useful.

As you would expect, PDFs that have password security applied can’t be opened with Word.

You can read more about this feature here.

Alas, this feature isn’t in Word for Mac 2011 (the latest version). 

For an alternate way to convert PDFs to Word, see PDF2Office (and PDF2ID) from Recosoft. If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can open the PDF in Acrobat Pro and choose File > Save As Other > Microsoft Word.

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