Hi,

I was sent an email asking to review this by someone at CometDocs, and it’s free, so I figured why not. It’s called Convertpdftoword.org which is also the website it’s hosted at, by no amazing coincidence. What is it? An online PDF to Word converter. Owned by Cometdocs.com who do a lot of different online file conversions.

PDF to Word? I know I get a lot of requests for this sort of thing, but historically the answer is either getting expensive software to convert, or ask the originator for a non-PDF version of the document.

This is cloud based, which always rings alarm bells for me. Do you want to send your documents to an unknown 3rd party, just because they’re offering a free service? That’s what you’ll need to decide, but this company resides in Canada and the servers for holding your files are located in the United States which matters to some people (the more security minded just won’t use this service).

So, how does it work? You just go to http://www.convertpdftoword.org/ , browse and upload your PDF, put in your email address and wait for the resulting Word document to arrive.

A few minutes later, and I’ve got emails for the two test PDFs I uploaded. They take you back to the site to download them, where they’re hosted for 24 hours. I don’t believe there’s any security behind this, apart from a unique URL – so again, you’d only do this with data you don’t care about others having.

Once you get back to their webpage to download, it sits ‘Processing’ for a few seconds and then starts downloading. It might be buggy with Internet Explorer 10, as it didn’t stop the ‘Processing’ dialogue even after the file had downloaded. This happened on both files.

The results were very impressive. They looked identical to the PDFs I had uploaded, with coloured pictures and all in the exact same positions. The file size blew out from 131kb to 2787kb on one of the examples, but probably expected with Word vs PDF compressions.

In summary, it seems to work really well in my random sample size of 2 documents. Handy if you want to edit a publicly available PDF, but I’m not sure how much demand there is for this.

As pointed out by the person who emailed me, the site gets it’s revenue from adverts. I didn’t get paid anything to write this, so I must have been in a good mood.