PDF is a fixed file format, which means the file stores where text images and graphics are placed on a page, but not necessarily the relationships among them. If the results aren’t what you expect, your original PDF file still remains safely intact. Keep in mind that PDF Reflow creates a copy of your content during the conversion. PDF Reflow converts the file and preserves all the content, however the text ends up in textboxes and won’t re-layout nicely across pages if you start typing in it. That isn’t to say we won’t try our best to convert any PDF file you hand us! For instance, let’s take a look at a PDF of a PowerPoint slide. All the original content is there, but because the PDF reflow process values the ability to edit the content over picture-perfect alignment, some of the content repositions. Some of the text in the first column wraps to the next line differently and a line from the top of the original second column moved to the end of the first. If a PDF contains mostly images and diagrams, as in a presentation or a brochure, converting it has a much higher likelihood of issues like the one in the columns example above.įor example, take a look at the document below. It works with any PDF, but because we re-layout the contents, the results are best with documents that are mostly textual, such as legal and business documents. The PDF Reflow feature is not intended as a replacement for a reader, such as Windows 8’s Reader, but rather is a converter that gives you a new level of access to your content. A list from a PDF, for instance, will act just like any other list in Word: hit Enter at the end of a bulleted paragraph and a new bullet will be created. In other words, when you convert a PDF in Word, the elements in the document should act as if you created them in Word. The goal of PDF Reflow is to convert PDF content into Word documents that contain the original layout intent and that flow correctly across pages when you edit or read.

PDF Reflow, a new feature in the upcoming release of Word, changes the landscape by letting you convert PDFs into editable Word documents. Most existing PDF viewers, in essence, limit people who use PDF’s to a “look but don’t touch” experience. For example, if you try to copy and paste table rows from a PDF viewer into Word, you frequently end up with a collapsed single line of text, as in the figure below. This means that most of us have been disappointed by the difficulty of getting rich content out of a PDF.

We’ve all received PDF files with content that we wanted to reuse.

How to unlock a document in word