Free PDF tools

Choosing the right PDF tool

Most PDF jobs fall into three groups. Converting — PDF to Word, Excel, JPG or plain text — turns a PDF into something you can edit or reuse. Rearranging — merge, split and rotate — changes which pages are in the file and in what order, without touching their quality. Shrinking and unlocking — compress and unlock — make a file small enough to send, or remove a password you already know.

Scanned PDFs are pictures of pages, so tools that need the text run OCR on them automatically. If you only need a scan to be searchable while it looks exactly the same, use PDF OCR.

Which converter to pick depends on what happens next. PDF to Word is for a document you need to edit and send back. PDF to Excel is for the tables inside a report or a bank statement, when you want to sort or total the figures. PDF to JPG turns each page into a picture, the quickest way to drop a page into a slide, a chat or a post. PDF to Text gives you the words alone, with no formatting, ready to paste anywhere. JPG to PDF goes the other way and gathers photos or scans into a single document.

Compression mostly works on the images inside a file, so a PDF of scanned pages or photos can often shrink a long way, while a PDF that is only text is usually small already. A common order of work is merge, then rotate any sideways pages, then compress, so you send one tidy file instead of several large ones.

Split PDF is the reverse of merging: pull out the pages you need, or break a long file into parts, so you share only the section that matters. Every tool keeps your original untouched, so you can try again with other settings if the first result is not quite right.

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