PDF exported to Word is gibberish - any ideas?

[billsiever]

I've just exported a PDF to Word but it's gibberish. Any ideas?

[Sara_Forsberg · Accepted solution]

Hi billsiever,

Can you please tell me a bit more about the PDF that you converted? For example:

1. Was it created from a scanned document?
2. What application did you use to create the PDF?
3. Do you run into this problem with all PDFs that you convert?

For starters, if the PDF already contains renderable text (that is, text that you can select), you can try turning off OCR. For instructions, please see How to disable Optical Character Recognition (OCR) when converting PDF to Word or Excel.

Please let us know how it goes.

Best,

Sara

[billsiever]

Thanks, Sara!

For whatever reason, I tried it again and it worked fine. I have no idea what I did differently.

-Bill

[Sara_Forsberg]

That's great news, Bill!

Best,

Sara