You have a PDF and want to edit its text, take its numbers into a spreadsheet or turn it into slides. Here’s which tool to use, what converts well, what needs tidying, and why some files come out empty.
In short
| You want | Use | You get |
|---|---|---|
| Editable text | PDF to Word | Paragraphs and pages, with pictures and tables |
| Tables and numbers | PDF to Excel | Rows and columns, numbers you can calculate with |
| Slides | PDF to PowerPoint | One slide per page, looking like the original |
| A scanned file | Thai OCR first | Text you can search and copy |
All of them run in your browser: nothing is uploaded.
Why it’s never a 100% copy
Microsoft explains that PDF is a fixed format: it stores where text, pictures and graphics sit on a page, but most PDFs don’t record what is a paragraph, table or column, so a converter has to infer the structure from positions.
Microsoft says conversion works best for mostly-text files, such as business, legal or scientific documents. Pages that are mostly charts or pictures may come through as a single image with no editable text, and lines and pages may break in different places.
PDF to Word
- Open PDF to Word and choose the file.
- Convert and download the .docx.
You get:
- text in paragraphs, with page breaks where the original has them;
- pictures placed where they are on the page;
- tables rebuilt as Word tables from the text positions — complex ones may need a little tidying;
- fonts, colours and fine layout that won’t match everywhere.
Thai text: Microsoft Learn explains that Thai doesn’t put spaces between words, so line breaking relies on analysis and dictionaries; converted Thai text may wrap differently from the original. Some PDFs also use old Thai fonts that don’t store standard character codes, so extracted text can be garbled. Always proofread.
PDF to Excel
- Open PDF to Excel and choose the file.
- Convert and download the .xlsx.
Text that lines up in the PDF lands in the same column, so clear row-by-row tables come out well. Numbers such as 1,234.50 or (1,200.00) become real numbers; values starting with 0, such as phone numbers or product codes, stay as text. Tables with merged cells or several lines per cell may need tidying.
PDF to PowerPoint
- Open PDF to PowerPoint and choose the file.
- Convert and download the .pptx.
You get one slide per page, the same size as the PDF page, looking exactly like the original — each slide is a picture of the page, so its text can’t be edited on the slide, but the page’s text is in the speaker notes. The file opens in PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote and LibreOffice Impress.
Scanned files need OCR first
A PDF from a scanner or a phone photo is a picture of the page with no characters in it, so converting it to Word gives no text to edit. Use Thai OCR to read the characters first, then convert the result.
Other ways
- Word: Microsoft explains that you can open a PDF with File > Open; Word makes a copy, converts it and tries to match the layout, and your original PDF stays as it was.
- Google Drive: Google explains that you right-click the file and choose Open with > Google Docs; the file should be 2 MB or smaller. Bold, italics and font size are likely to carry over, but lists, tables, columns and footnotes usually aren’t detected.
What DOCX, XLSX and PPTX are
They are Office Open XML file formats, standardised as ECMA-376 (ISO/IEC 29500). Microsoft explains that the "x" means an XML file without macros, and the files are zip-compressed, so many programs can open them.
Note
This article is based on Microsoft, Microsoft Learn, Google and Ecma International pages read on 30 September 2026; the tool details come from how the tools on this site actually work.
