Converting PDFs to editable documents

One of the most common ICT-related questions asked by PPD's partners is how to convert Adobe PDF documents to Microsoft (MS) Word or another editable format. Until recently, it has not been easy without the purchase of expensive (around $300US!) software.

A new website called PDFtoWord will convert PDF documents to MS Word (or just text) for free and email them to you: http://www.pdftoword.com/

We've tried out this site for a while and it works wonderfully! The MS Word results are impressively faithful to the PDF originals, including all graphics, lines, boxes, and bullets that can be easily edited to your liking. In addition, the conversion can also pull readable text from scanned images.

To use this converter site, all you have to do is:
1) Go to the website http://www.pdftoword.com/
2) Upload a PDF
3) Choose Word or Rich Text Format (RTF) (choose MS Word if you want full formating and graphics or RTF if you only want the text), and
4) Enter your email address.
5) Check your email inbox-- it may take a few minutes to receive the file.


Converting Microsoft (MS) Word documents to PDF has always been much easier. Newer versions of MS Office can save documents as PDF, and there are plenty of free online and downloadable programs that can do this.

1) One of the easiest free websites to use is PrimoOnline. It converts documents, images and websites to PDF for free: https://online.primopdf.com

2) You can always convert through your email inbox:
These email addresses do free file conversion for Word docs, PDFs, and even MP3s easily-- all you have to do is send an email with an attached file and you will shortly receive a reply with the converted file attached.

• pdf@koolwire.com—Converts MS Word, Excel or PowerPoint files to PDFs.
  
• doc@koolwire.com—Convert PDFs to MS Word or Rich Text Format files.

3) If you convert a number of documents, files, and websites to PDFs, you can download free software such as PDFCreator: http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator