The basics

On the home page, press Select a PDF or drop the file on the dotted area.
The upload starts at once. Then the bar follows the conversion page by page; you can see which page is being processed.
When it reaches 100 %, press Download DOCX. The file keeps the name of your PDF.

A text PDF of a few pages is usually ready in seconds. If several people convert at the same moment, your file waits briefly in line and the bar tells you so.

Scans & photos

Some PDFs contain no text at all, only pictures of pages: anything from a scanner, a fax or a phone camera. For those, the letters have to be recognised one by one (OCR). This is detected automatically, but you can force it with the switch My PDF is a scan or a photo, which is the first thing to try if the Word file shows strange symbols or text you cannot select.

For the best OCR: scan at 300 dpi or more, keep the page flat and well lit, and avoid shadows across the text. Slightly tilted pages are straightened automatically. Handwriting is not recognised.

OCR takes longer than a normal conversion, about one to three seconds per page.

Right-to-left text

Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hebrew are a classic weak point of PDF converters: words come out in reverse order, letters lose their joins, and tables are flipped. Here, right-to-left paragraphs are written as right-to-left paragraphs in Word, with the correct alignment and table direction, and mixed lines (for example Arabic with French or numbers) keep their logical order. The same applies to scanned Arabic documents.

Limits

Up to 50 MB and 300 pages per PDF.
40 conversions per hour from the same connection.
Files are erased 60 minutes after upload, so download your result straight away.
Password-protected PDFs cannot be opened by the converter.

When something goes wrong

“This file does not look like a PDF”: The file may have the wrong extension or be damaged. Open it in a PDF reader and save it again as a new PDF.
The PDF is protected by a password: Open it with its password, then print it to a new PDF (“Microsoft Print to PDF” on Windows, “Save as PDF” on a Mac or phone) and convert that copy.
The text is full of odd characters: The PDF uses fonts without proper text encoding. Convert it again with the scan switch turned on.
The layout is a little different: Word flows text from line to line while a PDF fixes every letter in place, so magazine-style pages, text over pictures or rare fonts can shift. The content itself is all there and editable.
The conversion stopped: Try once more. If it fails again, write to us with the number of pages and whether it is a scan. Please don't e-mail confidential documents.

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