PDF to Word

A PDF was never meant to be edited

That is not a flaw. The format exists so a document looks the same everywhere, which it achieves by describing positions rather than paragraphs.

Convert one and seeThe result opens in Word

So a conversion is a reconstruction. Something has to read the positions and work backwards to the structure: this run of text is a heading, these lines belong to one paragraph, this block is a table. Most of the time it gets there. Sometimes it guesses, and the guess is visible.

What comes through cleanly

Body text in a single column, headings, ordinary lists and simple tables. Documents that were written in Word, exported to PDF and are now going back tend to come out close to where they started, because the structure was regular to begin with.

What needs a look afterwards

Multi-column layouts

Newsletters and academic papers put two or three columns on a page. Reading order has to be inferred, and the inference is occasionally wrong.

Tables without ruled lines

A table held together by spacing rather than borders is hard to tell from an oddly aligned paragraph.

Scans

A photographed or scanned page contains an image, not text. There is nothing underneath for a converter to read.

Both of those are commercial facts rather than technical ones, and it is better to read them now than at the download button.