The best free PDF to Word converter 2017

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The best free PDF to Word converter

If the precise formatting and fonts of a document are essential, PDF is the perfect format. It requires nothing more than a competent PDF reader for documents to display precisely; everything's packaged in and ready to go. Which is all lovely until you need to extract some of that information.

PDFs are usually a one-way street, consigning you to look and not touch. Unless you possess the original document used to generate the PDF in the first place, editing is going to be out of your reach.

Or is it? We're here to look at the solution: free PDF to Word converters. These tools will analyse PDF files, extract the text and images, and make the best stab they can at creating a Microsoft Word-compatible file that replicates the source.

Bear in mind that even with the best free PDF to Word converter, results are unlikely to be absolutely perfect – particularly if the text in your PDF has been scanned or flattened to an image. Look for a converter with OCR (optical character recognition) if you do have flattened documents.

Have we missed your favorite PDF to Word converter? Let us know in the comments below.

Another online converter, Nitro did a good job with our magazine page, but it's a shame you have to wait for the document to be emailed rather than downloading it directly from the site

1. Nitro PDF to Word Converter

Nitro PDF to Word Converter offers solid PDF conversion with just a couple of niggles

You'd be forgiven for missing the free online version of Nitro PDF to Word Converter when visiting its site, given that it's so smothered in adverts for its paid-for desktop app, but this is a perfectly competent free tool – no OCR though, sadly – suitable for occasional use.

Upload your PDF, give it an email address to send the results to, and it'll transform that PDF into Word, Excel or Powerpoint files and vice versa; we wouldn't recommend using the Excel converter for mission-critical work, however.

We were impressed with this free PDF to Word converter's attempt at converting our test document. There was a bit of text cleanup required, possibly as a result of the unusual font, but it separated the page’s images into individually editable boxes, got the layout perfectly correct, and even managed to replicate the drop-cap, a feature that’s often missed.

Overall, not a bad job at all – the best free PDF to Word converter you'll find.

Try it online: Nitro PDF to Word Converter

UniPDF isn't perfect, but it copes well with different fonts and can process PDFs in batches

2. UniPDF

UniPDF is a great choice for batch PDF to Word conversion, but isn't compatible with all files

UniPDF is a completely free Windows desktop PDF to Word converter (unless you're using it commercially) but one which fell over for an unspecified reason when converting our test PDF to Word format. But let's not be hasty here: UniPDF happily extracted the raw text, had no problem converting the PDF to a pixel-perfect PNG file, and did an good job of converting that very same PDF to HTML format, which we'll count as at least a partial pass.

Although UniPDF's free PDF to Word converter doesn't support OCR (so flattened PDFs won't convert to editable text) we were impressed with its ability to translate our document's mildly unusual fonts into similar examples. It's also an easy app to use if you're doing batch processing – just drag in a folder full of PDFs, hit 'convert' and it'll go through each automatically.

Considering the long-winded limitations of many online tools, this is a reason to try UniPDF. But if you absolutely must have a Word document? Maybe not.

Download here: UniPDF

Free File Converter doesn't do the best job with text, but it can handle very large PDFs

3. Free File Converter

Free File Converter is a bit quick and dirty, but it's easy to use, with broad format support

Free File Converter couldn't be simpler: upload your PDF, select an output format (everything from doc to ebook formats like EPUB and MOBI) and click the button to get a download link to your converted file. As you might expect, it offers a number of different format conversions besides just PDFs, although unlike the best free PDF to Word converters, there's no OCR to be seen.

As a free PDF to Word converter, its performance was okay, but not exceptional. Some of the text formatting Free File Converter gave us was a bit off, with certain headlines running over from one line to two, and it rendered all of the images on the page as a single background graphic, limiting flexibility.

But there's one huge upside: Free File Converter can handle PDFs up to 300MB in size, so if you've got a huge, simple PDF to convert to Word format, it could be just the trick.

Try it online: Free File Converter

OnlineOCR works best with simple documents; complex fonts and images are beyond its capabilities

4. OnlineOCR

A free PDF to Word converter that's an OCR specialist – as long as you feed it the right file

OnlineOCR is the only OCR-only free PDF to Word converter in this test, but there's a reason: OCR works well in certain circumstances, and very poorly in others. Our magazine page, when flattened and run through OnlineOCR's converter, did not fare well. Whether this is a limitation of the unusual fonts or the background images we're not sure, but the mess it made of the boxes at the bottom of the page suggest it's just not great at this sort of complex PDF to Word conversion.

That's not to say it's a poor tool. Far from it; this outperforms a number of competing sites in its class, so much so that we've actually used OnlineOCR here at TechRadar to pull text from magazines so old that their archive discs have crumbled – although this required a lot of preprocessing to improve the clarity and contrast of text.

Scanned PDFs of black text on white background tend to work perfectly without any fiddling, so if you've got a suitable source you'll get on well with this tool.

Try it online: OnlineOCR

See all the free PDF software available to download on TechRadar