This converter is ranked #12 in our comparison of free PDF to Word converter tools (i.e. out of 16 converters, it is #12).
LibreOffice is based on OpenOffice and may be the free/open source Office suite of choice. It is similar in almost every way to OpenOffice (above), except that the PDF import plugin comes preinstalled by default in LibreOffice. Like OpenOffice, LibreOffice lets you open PDF directly in the drawing module of the suite, where you can edit and save PDF’s directly; and as with OpenOffice, we need to point out that although you can open, edit and save PDF’s, you cannot convert them to any format readable in Word. The same strange limitation is also present in LibreOffice: large files that have a lot of pages or a lot of different elements inside them are extremely painful to open and work with.
| Overall Rating: C+. TIER 2. Be mindful that comparing this with tools that DO perform PDF to Word conversions is comparing oranges to apples. |
| Desktop vs. Online: Windows; Mac; Linux. |
| Converts to (file type): DOES NOT CONVERT TO WORD. However; will let you edit and save your PDF directly. |
| Handling of Text: C Handling of Images: B Handling of Tables: B |
| Reliability: C OCR Support: No Max File Size: Large files slow to load – or do not load at all |
| Is it Free?: Yes. |
| Where to download?: download on this page. |
| Strengths: Great for quick ad-hoc edits or small edits in small documents. Text and special characters render very well. Multiplatform desktop app means that you do not have to upload your file(s) to the internet. |
| Weaknesses: Does not actually convert to a Word format. Text (and tables) can be very labor intensive to edit. Large files (say 4 or 5 MB plus or PDFs with more than a handful of pages) inexplicably cause the program to hang or take a very long time to open and exhibit performance issues. Image rendering is somewhat variable; with images sometimes distorted or sliced into little pieces. |
