How to Copy Text from a PDF to a Microsoft Word Document

This article was co-authored by Luigi Oppido and by wikiHow staff writer, Kyle Smith. Luigi Oppido is the Owner and Operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. Luigi has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, virus removal, and upgrades. He is also the host of the Computer Man Show! broadcasted on KSQD covering central California for over two years.

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This wikiHow teaches you how to copy text from a PDF and paste it into Microsoft Word. If the PDF was created from a text document on a computer, you can use Adobe Acrobat Reader (Windows/Mac) or Preview (Mac) to copy the text. If the PDF was scanned into the computer from a physical document or it has copy-protection, you'll need to use Google Drive to convert the text before you can transfer your document to Word. If you need to convert a PDF file to Word format, you can use Adobe Acrobat Pro or the free Adobe Acrobat web app. You can also open a PDF file directly in Word and it’ll convert the PDF’s contents to text.