Portable Document Format (PDF) is a common format for sharing final versions of files. The format is most used for viewing and not editing. But if you need to edit PDF files, Microsoft Word brings many features to the word-processing table, including the capability to edit PDFs.
Office 2010 provided the option to save a document as PDF, but Microsoft Word 2013 and later even allows editing of the content before sending it to the final recipient as a PDF file. Although the full version of Adobe Acrobat allows users to modify PDFs, it’s more cumbersome than editing the original document in MS Office. Why so? PDF is technically an image file; converting this image file back to text needs sophisticated OCR like Adobe Acrobat X Pro or other tools. Adobe Free Reader, therefore, does not allow you to modify the content in a PDF. With Word now, you can convert a PDF into a Word document and edit the content.
In this post, we will see how to edit PDF files in Word.
How to edit PDF Files in Word
When you install Office, you will notice that the context menu for any PDF file, has an option to open a PDF file in Microsoft Word, along with your other PDF Readers like Adobe Reader or Foxit and Windows Reader, if you are on Windows 11/10.
Go to any PDF file location, right-click on the PDF file, select ‘Open with’ option, and choose ‘Word (desktop) to open it in Word. When you open any PDF file in Word, it starts to convert it using Microsoft PDF Reflow.
Microsoft PDF Reflow will convert all the file’s contents, including its formatting like paragraphs, lists, headers, columns, footnotes, tables, etc, into Word content. You will be able to edit even the tables. I tried with various smaller PDF documents and it kept all its formatting, even after the conversion. Then I also tried bigger-sized PDFs like e-books (sized ~30MB). It took some time to convert – but it did its job. So, you can try large files, too if you have some newer systems with more memory.
Anyway, next, a dialog box with the message should appear on your computer screen.
“Word will convert your PDF to an editable Word document. The resulting Word document will be optimized to allow you to edit the text, so it might not look exactly like the original PDF, especially if the original file contained lots of graphics.”
Click the OK button to continue opening the file in Word. Once it opens the PDF in Word, it will be in Read-Only / Protected mode
Upon opening the file, click the Enable Editing button next to the warning message to begin editing your PDF file. Once the editing is completed, click File, click Save as button to save the file. Here, remember, you cannot save the changes to the existing PDF file readily.
To maintain your changes, you must save the document with a new name or to a different location.
So, if you get a pop bearing the same message, do not be surprised. Try saving the PDF with a different name or save the file in Word or PDF format.
Depending on the situation, one option may work better than the other:
- PDF: If you don’t want to make any more changes to the document, save the edited document as a PDF file.
- Word document: If you want to continue making changes to the document (or if you need a second pair of eyes for approving the changes), save it as a Word document. You can always save it as a PDF file later on.
This is a great feature in Microsoft Word, among many other cool features of Microsoft Office.
I hope you find this tutorial useful.
TIP: You can convert, compress, sign PDF documents using free Acrobat Online tools.
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