Not Able to Copy Text from PDF

[gregoryw1423]

I used to be able to right click on the pdf document and the whole screen would turn blue, copy it, and then put it in a Word document.  Now Adobe Reader does not do that anymore.  I am also not able to copy a portion of the text in the pdf document. How can I fix?  Thanks, Lisa

[Claudio González]

Can you select a few words of the text? If you can't, you don't have proper text but an image of text.

[jane-e]

Also, go to File > Properties and check the security tab to see if it has been locked down:

[gregoryw1423]

One of the documents is a pdf that I created from Excel.  So there is no text to be copied.  I just want to right click and have the whole document copied to place in a Word document.  The other pdf document I received via email.  Same thing, I want to right click for the whole document to be copied into a Word document.

I checked the above properties and those all match to what you have advised.  I just want it to go back to how it used to be where I can right click on the pdf (it turns blue) and copy it.  This just changed about a week ago and I don't know why.  So frustrating.

[jane-e]

If the whole thing turns blue, that usually means it is an image. Does it say "Copy Image" when you right-click?

If your document is made of text, it will look more like this when you right-click:

How do you usually create your PDFs from Excel?

When you usually do this, which tool do you use, and does it go into Word as an image or as a table?

If you selected the text in Excel and copied it, then pasted directly to Word, it would come in as an editable table.

[gregoryw1423]

When I create pdfs in Word or Excel I just save as a pdf.  The Excel document I saved as a pdf was a chart.  All I am trying to do is copy the pdf page and paste it in a Word document.  It used to be that any pdf I could click the pdf page, it would turn blue, then I would right click to copy the pdf page.  I was able to do this a week ago.  Now something has happened that I cannot do this any longer.  I am not trying to do anything complicated. 

[sandralee62412]

I was finally able to reach a tech that explained to me:

"Because it's a scanned document, it will recognize it as an image. If you try to highlight text, it will select the complete image. It can't be changed using Acrobat Reader.
But if using Acrobat Pro DC, you need to click "scan & ocr"; then "recognize text". Takes about a minute to recognize the text/document.
(Because it's a scanned document, if you want to highlight text, you would need to recognize the text first).

[Kylie22253599llci]

Thank you for this! helped a great deal