Some – but not all – of these methods include OCR as part of the process. You can’t convert a scanned PDF to a Word document without the extra step of doing OCR. If the mouse cursor draws a box without regard to the words, then it’s just a scan and you can’t do anything with the words yet. If each word is highlighted individually, OCR has been done.

An easy way to find out: open the PDF, hold the left mouse button down, and drag along the words. If you use another program to create PDFs from a scanner, it might or might not do OCR before it saves the file. It’s a setting in the scan dialog – “Make Searchable (Run OCR).” If you use Adobe Acrobat to scan, the OCR is probably done right after the scan is finished. If it’s handwritten or has marks, OCR can be just awful. If it’s typed and neat, OCR can be very accurate. Optical Character Recognition looks at the page and tries to figure out whether there are words. You can’t edit that PDF in Word until OCR has been done. It might be words or it might be a photograph of a grumpy cat. PDF created from a scanner When a document is scanned, however, the scanner takes a picture of the page – and at that moment, your computer has no knowledge of what’s on that page. You can convert the PDF into a Word document. PDF created from a web browser or from an Office program When a PDF is created onscreen from a program like Internet Explorer or Word, the words in the document are saved in the PDF along with the layout and formatting. Before we talk about how to do that, let’s make sure you understand that there are two different types of PDFs – PDFs that understand the individual words on the page, and scanned PDFs that are just a picture. But the general point is true – Adobe Acrobat is not a word processor and PDFs aren’t meant to be edited directly.įrequently it would be helpful to edit the contents of a PDF in Microsoft Word. Adobe Acrobat has all kinds of tools to mark up PDFs and even do light editing (as well as tools to lock down PDFs to prevent any alternations). It has a secondary characteristic: it’s difficult to edit a PDF very extensively. The PDF format is designed to display a document accurately regardless of what device is used to view it. Here are four ways to do that, including a couple that you don’t know about. Sometimes it’s necessary or helpful to edit the contents of a PDF file in Microsoft Word. Offices might be creating more PDFs than Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. PDFs are used for everything, from scanning the mail to exchanging contracts during negotiations. Offices have settled on PDF as the universal file format.

Convert pdf to editable word document