This was originally going to be a simple “The Best…” list on ways to easily convert PDF files to Word, and to do the reverse. It started off small when I began, but there has recently been an explosion in sites offering free conversion services, and I just haven’t had time to try them all out, nor put much time to carefully revising this post.

So it’s turned more into a somewhat disjointed “list” of these kinds of services.

I didn’t really understand why I might want to convert a document to a PDF until I read this article listing ten reasons Why To Convert Word To PDF.

Here are links to several online conversion tools:

PDF Converter

PDF On Fly

Zamzar

Now, for the other way around.

One thing that has annoyed me is the difficulty in copying and pasting text from a PDF document I find on the Internet. Sometimes I see a portion of a document, for example, on language learning research that I want to email to someone or incorporate in an something I’m writing (with attribution, of course!), but it won’t allow me to extract a portion of the text.

In addition,  Zamzar and Cometdocs lets you convert both ways.  As do You Convert It and Convert Files.

And, of course, there’s the appropriately-named site called Convert PDF To Word. And there’s another similarly named tool called PDF To Word.

The HTML PDF Converter will let you convert any webpage into a PDF file. Another very similar site is called HTML to PDF.

Web2PDF is an extremely simple way to convert any webpage into a PDF file. PDF Crowd does the same thing.

DocsPal is a new web application that lets you easily convert documents and images from one format to another, including PDF to Word and in the reverse.

Online-ConVert lets you convert lots of different files. It wasn’t working for me very well when I tried it, but others speak highly of it.

docDroid is an interesting take on document conversion. You upload a document in pretty much any format you want (Word, PDF, etc.). Then you email the link to someone, who can then download the document in any format you want. In other words, if you think someone might want to convert your doc, it saves them the extra step of having to go to a different document converter to do so.

PDF Online is another in a long list of tools available to convert files into PDF documents. What makes it stand-out, though, is that David Deubelbeiss says it’s the best he’s found. And David knows his stuff. So if he says it’s the best, that’s good enough for me.

PDFdoc lets you convert your Word document to PDF form and vice versa.

Light PDF lets you convert PDFs to Word documents or the other way around.

How to Annotate PDFs is from Richard Byrne.

An Easy Way to Convert PDFs Into Word Documents is from Richard Byrne.

CleverPDF lets you do a lot of things with PDFs, including converting them to Word.

I Love PDF lets you do a lot of things with…PDFs.

Pdf.to is another document conversion tool.

Ace Thinker has yet another tool for converting PDF files.

Safe Notes lets you annotate PDF, as well as letting you do lots of other things to them. It doesn’t let you convert them to Word documents, but I’m still adding it here.

Lotta Tools also lets you do a…”lotta” of things to a PDF.

Simpdf :: Minimal PDF editor

Web To PDF

Tiny Wow

DocFly is an online PDF editor.

Simple PDF is a Chrome extension that lets you edit any PDF.

PDF Escape is a free online PDF editor

Let me know which ones you think work best!

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