
Using Google Drive to convert the PDF to Google Docs. The hard, frustrating way to do this involves copying and pasting text from the PDF into Word or a text editor, and then dealing with lots of formatting problems - copying text from a PDF ignores column structures and tables, which leads to weird braks, and sometimes unneeded text is captured, including page numbers, headers and footers.īut there’s a workaround that involves Google Drive and the free online word processor included with Drive, called Google Docs. docx file format or Google Docs, so the text can be updated or edited. What typically happens is people find they need to extract text from or convert a PDF to Microsoft Word’s. However, PDFs cannot be edited, except with special software. Adobe PDF documents are meant for publishing and displaying information according to fixed layouts. It’s a very common - and very frustrating - scenario.
This post and video (updated in 2015) show you how to do it. If you write reports, publish research, help companies produce manuals or marketing material, or deal with legal documents, eventually you will want to learn how to convert a PDF to Word or Google Docs for editing or republishing.