Using the mouse cursor, select the text you wish to copy and then hit Command+C.Open the PDF file into Preview app on a Mac.Plus you can convert the file into anything you want, whether it’s doc, docx, rtf, or even a pdf. Would you have guessed that copying and pasting is reasonably effective at getting the text out of a PDF file and turning it into a DOC or DOCX file? It’s not quite converting the PDF to DOC through any automated fashion, and it’s quite low tech, but if the PDF in question is primarily (or entirely) text based, it works surprisingly well.

Option 2: Copy Text from PDF & Paste Into a DOC in Mac OS X The primary downside to Google Docs is that it requires web access and internet access to use, otherwise it’s free and easy to try out, and it just may work for you. You can then open the DOCX file in Microsoft Office, or with the Apple Pages app to verify the conversion went smoothly. Google Docs is legitimately good at converting PDF files into a usable DOCX format and it often preserves formatting very well.

Pull down the File menu within Google Docs and choose “Download As” and select “Microsoft Word (DOCX)” and save the Word DOCX file to the Mac.

Click on the Upload button and choose the PDF file in question from the Mac.

Head to Google Docs website and login with a Google account.

The web-based Google Docs has a rather impressive PDF conversion tools built in as we’ve discussed before, and it works quite well. Option 1: Converting PDF Files to DOCX with Google Docs Keep in mind if the file in question has password protection, you’ll need to remove the PDF file password first, then start the conversion process afterwards. Finally, we’ll cover a more automated method that is an extension of the first text extraction approach, which can convert PDF to text files that you can edit, which is perhaps most appropriate for casual uses and with simple PDF files. Next, we’ll show you a paid solution from Adobe which is a thorough and complex PDF to DOC converter tool that is best used for professional applications, and an alternative native Mac app which offers similar functionality. First we’ll walk through how you can use Google Docs to convert a file to Word format, then we’ll who you how you can potentially extract the text from a PDF document which you can then turn into DOC or DOCX on your own.

Mac screenshot to pdf converter