Converting PDF into word

Acrobat documents, more commonly known as PDFs (portable document format) come in a variety of styles but if the ones you are interested in originated as text documents then it is often possible to highlight the part that you want and use your pdf reader’s Text Copy function to copy it to the Windows Clipboard and from there Paste it into a Word document.

You may find this easier with an alternative PDF reader called Foxit which has the Text copy option on the toolbar. But sometimes the document’s author or publisher will have locked or protected it, preventing simple copy and paste functions. Assuming that copyright infringement is not an issue then there are several workarounds. The simplest (free) one is to print the document then scan it using OCR (optical character recognition) software and convert what is essentially an image of words on paper, into editable text. This trick also works with pdfs that have been created from scanned images, providing the print is sufficiently sharp.