Portable Document format (PDF) is the most common format for sharing files once the editing has been done and all the collaboration on the document is finished. This format is used in most offices mainly for viewing and not editing. However, if you DO need to edit PDF files, Word 2013 has myriad features and one of the best ones is the ability to edit your PDFs!
Yes, Word 2013 has gone a step further than its predecessor (2010) that finally allows us to save our documents as PDFs. In Word 2013 we can even edit our PDF documents contents prior to sending it to the recipient. Now if you have the full licensed version of Adobe Acrobat you can edit your PDFs, but it’s a little bit clumsier than doing your editing right in Word. The reason for this is that a PDF is technically an image file and converting it back to text requires OCR, like Adobe Acrobat Pro or other tools. So the free Acrobat Reader, does not allow you to modify the content of a PDF. Using Word 2013, however, you can convert a PDF into a Word document and edit the content.
When you installed Office 2013 you may have noticed that the context menu for any PDF file has an option to open a PDF file in Microsoft Word, along with other PDF Readers (i.e., Acrobat Reader, Foxit and Windows Reader (on Windows 8).
So, follow the steps below to learn how:
- Go to any PDF file located on your computer, right-click on it and select Open with and select Word to open it in Word 2013. It will start to convert using Microsoft PDF Reflow.
- Microsoft Reflow will convert all the file contents, even your formatting (i.e., paragraphs, lists, headers, columns, footnotes, tables, etc. Yes, you can even edit tables!
- You can do this with small documents or even the larger ones such as e-Books. e-Books take more time to convert, but you can still do it if you have enough memory on your computer.
- Click OK to continue opening the file in Word 2013.
- Once the document has been opened in Word, it will be in Read Only (protected) mode.
- When opening the file, click the Enable Editing button next to the warning message and begin editing your PDF file.
- At the completion of your editing, click File | Save As to save your file. Remember, you cannot readily save your changes to the existing PDF file.
- To maintain your changes, you must save your document with a new name or to a different location.
- So do not be surprised if you receive the warning below.
- You can save your file as either a PDF file – if you are finished editing.
or
- You can save your file as a Word document – if you want to continue making changes to your document or need to collaborate with colleagues further on your document. You can always save it as a PDF file later.
I think this is one of the greatest features in Word 2013 among others. I think you will agree with me on this!
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