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October 24, 2019
Question

How accurate is exporting pdf to MS Word

  • October 24, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 1642 views

I have a very unique report generated from MS Access that I export as a pdf. It has a lot of text formatting and text placement. If I export the file directly to a MS Word file the formatting is all lost. I can select text from the pdf document and copy and paste it into MS Word, and it mostly looks good, except it adds newline characters to every line. So, my question is, how accurate is the export from pdf to MS Word?

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    2 replies

    ls_rbls
    ls_rbls
    Community Expert
    October 25, 2019

    Hi,

     

    If you are comfortable using the copy and paste method from PDF to MS Word, make that when you right-click to paste the content in Word that you select from the context menu the option that allows you to keep the formatting.

     

    Another option is to save the PDF as a plain text file.

     

    And also, disable in MS Word any Macros, templates and add ins before you convert the PDF to MS Word.

     

    I thinks that in Preferences , Export to,  there may be also some preflight options that you can customize and save as a profile just for that operation.

     

    ls_rbls
    ls_rbls
    Community Expert
    October 25, 2019

    In any case, isn't it or should it be easier to export from MS Access to MS Excel , then to MS Word, and then finally to PDF?

    Dave__M
    Dave__M
    Community Expert
    October 25, 2019

    That's a difficult question.   There are so many things that can effect the conversion.  I've seen it work well, and I've seen it work very poorly.  PDFs are made in countless ways, and from countless sources, and this weighs heavily on how it translates to Word, in my experience.  If the doc was printed to PDF, the structure will be different from a PDF made using the PDF maker in Office.  I would experiment to see which yields the best results... and you may not like any of them, unfortunatly.  Good luck!

     

    Dave

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