Text-only or formatted — pick by your goal

Step by step — just the text into Word

1. Confirm you want text-only. Need the layout/images? Use a formatted PDF→Word instead. Just the words? Continue.
2. OCR if it is a scan. Recover text with PDF OCR (see OCR + reformat) and verify — no text, nothing to extract.
3. Convert to Word. Use PDF to Word (see PDF to Word) to get the content into an editable document.
4. Strip to plain text. Remove images and reset formatting to plain in Word, keeping just the words (re-style headings as you like).
5. Fix reading order. Check the text flows correctly (complex layouts can interleave) and reorder any out-of-sequence sections.
6. Extract tables separately if needed. Text-only flattens tables — if the data matters, extract it to a spreadsheet instead of relying on the text dump.
7. Use the clean text. Rewrite, restructure, or paste it where you need — that was the goal. (For a layout-faithful or accessible version, see PDF to Word for accessibility.)

Related reading and tools

• PDF to Word: the general conversion.
• PDF to formatted Word: when you want layout and images.
• PDF to Google Docs: editable in Docs instead.
• OCR + reformat: for scanned PDFs.
• PDF to Word for accessibility: remediating structure.
• PDF to Word tool: convert in your browser.
• All ScoutMyTool PDF tools: the full toolkit.

FAQ

Why would I want text-only instead of a formatted conversion?

Because sometimes the layout and images are exactly what you do not want. If you are repurposing content — rewriting an article, pulling copy into a new template, feeding text into another system, or just cleaning up a messy document — a faithful formatted conversion brings along columns, image placement, and spacing you then have to strip out. A text-only conversion gives you the words in a clean, simple Word document you can immediately work with. So choose text-only when the content matters and the original layout does not; choose a formatted conversion when you need the document to look like the original. They are different goals, and text-only is the simpler, faster path when you just need the words.

How do I get just the text into Word?

Convert the PDF to Word and then keep only the text — either by using a conversion focused on text, or by converting normally and then stripping images and resetting formatting to plain in Word. The result is a document with the readable text in simple paragraphs, without the original's images, columns, or decorative formatting. For a born-digital PDF with real text, this is quick and clean. The aim is editable plain content: headings can stay as text (you can re-style them), but the visual layout is intentionally dropped. You end up with words you can rewrite, restructure, or paste elsewhere without fighting inherited formatting.

Will the reading order be correct?

Usually yes for simple documents, and worth checking for complex ones. Text extraction follows the order the text is stored in the PDF, which matches the visual order for straightforward single-column documents but can interleave or scramble on multi-column or heavily-laid-out pages (a sidebar landing mid-paragraph, for instance). Since you are dropping layout anyway, you will likely tidy the text regardless, but check that the order reads correctly and fix any out-of-sequence sections. For a clean single-column source the order comes out right; for a complex one, expect a quick reorder pass as part of getting clean text-only output.

What happens to tables and lists?

In a pure text-only conversion, tables tend to come out as runs of text (cell contents in sequence) rather than as structured tables, and lists as plain lines, because you are dropping structure to get plain text. If the tabular data matters, a text-only conversion is the wrong tool — extract the table to a spreadsheet instead. If you just need the words and the occasional table is incidental, the flattened text is fine and you can re-format any list or table you want to keep in Word. So decide by whether the structure matters: text-only is for prose content; structured data wants a table extraction, not a text dump.

What if the PDF is a scan?

Then there is no text to extract until you OCR it — a scanned PDF is images, so a text-only conversion of it would give you nothing (or an image). OCR it first to recognise the words, verify the OCR (it misreads, especially numbers and names), and then you have real text to bring into Word as text-only. For a scanned document where you want just the words, OCR is the essential first step; after that the text-only workflow proceeds normally. Skipping OCR on a scan and expecting text-only output is the common mistake — there is simply no text there yet.

Is text-only the same as copy-pasting from the PDF?

Similar in spirit, but a conversion is usually cleaner and handles a whole document at once. Copy-pasting works for a passage but often brings odd line breaks, lost paragraph structure, and misses text in complex layouts, and doing it page by page for a long document is tedious. A text-only conversion processes the entire PDF and gives you a Word document you can edit, typically with better paragraph handling. For a quick snippet, copy-paste is fine; for a whole document's worth of clean text in Word, the conversion is the better tool. Either way you are after the words, not the look.

Is it safe to convert a confidential PDF this way?

Prefer a tool that converts locally so a confidential document is not uploaded. ScoutMyTool converts PDF to Word and OCRs scans entirely in your browser tab, so the file never leaves your machine; you then strip to text in Word as you like. For anything sensitive, confirm the tool does not upload before using it.

Citations

1. Wikipedia — “Office Open XML” (ISO/IEC 29500), the Word .docx target. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
2. Wikipedia — “Plain text,” the words-without-formatting concept. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_text
3. Wikipedia — “PDF” (ISO 32000), the source format. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF