Convert PDFs to Google Docs and Back (Images and Formatting Included)

PDF is a great file type it allows you to transfer documents pretty much anywhere in the world and whoever is receiving it can open it up in an application and read it when you want to edit them however it can be more challenging especially if you're going to use Google Docs so how can we convert a PDF to a Google doc edit it in Google Docs and then export it back to a PDF well if you hang around I will show you everything you need to know about converting and working with PDFs and Google Docs okay so I have this old Media Kit here on my desktop and this isn't something that I use anymore but it's a PDF and so I want to open this up in Google Docs okay so here we are in Google Docs and I will let you know right off the bat that sometimes you can convert PDFs directly to a Google doc right here in Google Docs without using any other application and sometimes you can't and the big factor that determines whether you can or can't is whether or not your PDF has images in it if it's strictly text you'll be able to convert it right away and edit it if it has images Google Docs Google Drive doesn't do the best at bringing in those images you're going to have to use a third-party program but I'm going to use one that's trusted and that's free so hopefully that will give you a little bit of a better peace of mind but let's take a look at just bringing this PDF in as is to do that first I want to show you what this PDF looks like so let's go ahead and let's minimize this real quick and let's just open this PDF up in preview you'll notice that it has text you know in quite a bit of it it has images image at the top there an image here and then there's also like a little bit of a table here again this is all old I haven't even looked at this to see if it's relevant to my current pricing so don't think that that this is what it is but you can see it has pretty much all aspects of a PDF that PDFs often have so it's a good example to you so let's close this out and let's go back into Google Drive okay so from within Google Drive we're just going to click on new and we're going to click on file upload and we're just going to upload this PDF directly so we'll just select it from the desktop and again this is the same for Windows or Mac users I'm obviously on a Mac but this will work the same it's actually going to be easier for Windows users and I'll tell you that a little bit later on that's actually the same but it might be easier for Windows users so I've already uploaded this before but I'm just going to uh we'll just say keep both so we upload a new version so you can you can see that I've uploaded this a bunch I use this as examples so let's go to recent so we'll go to recent since we just uploaded it and here we go we have this old Media Kit it's got the two that we uploaded at 12 51 PM that too will help us you know determine that this is the the new version that we're working with so if we just click to open this up it opens it up in Google Docs or Google drive's PDF viewer so we can view it and everything's there it looks the same as it did it is the same it's still a PDF we're just viewing it in a different program okay so that's great but I want to edit this and obviously from here I can't edit it so what I can try and do is I can go up here to the top and I can click this open with Google Docs link alternatively we could have just right clicked on it and gone to open with and clicked Google Docs as well so multiple ways same result so now Google Docs tries to convert it and it does convert some of it you'll notice that we have all of the text converted so I could go in here and I could you know change the text however we didn't get any of the images there were quite a few images you know I just showed you let's see if we can pull it up here on the desktop we'll just use a spacebar preview I mean it didn't get this image at all it didn't get any of the images if we scroll down you'll notice this is it this is it right here because none of these images came in so that is obviously an issue now I could there are multiple ways to solve this I could you know command Shift 4 on my Mac or Snipping tool on Windows and I could screenshot these images and stuff like that but I don't that's not what I would recommend that's just an option if you're in like a dire situation so if you want to bring this PDF into Google drive or Google Docs and actually edit it with the images you need to convert it first and the easiest way to do that is to actually convert it to a doc X so this is why I said it might be easier for Windows users but don't worry Mac users I have a solution you're not going to have to buy word don't worry so for Windows users you should be able to go into Microsoft Word and then go ahead and open up the PDF that you would like to convert and then you should be able to go to the file menu and hit export as or convert and just convert it to a docx I'm going to show you another way to do that so I'm going to assume that you can figure that out in word if not you can follow this other method as well so the other method is to use Adobe so if I open up this other window I have here in Chrome you'll notice that I'm at adobe.com forward slash acrobat forward slash online forward slash PDF to word.html you can see it there I'll put a link to this in the description so you can just click on that it'll make it a little bit easier and this is actually a free tool by Adobe so this is an online version of Adobe Acrobat and yes there's a paid version for acrobat but this isn't the paid version this is just a free conversion tool and I found just by kind of going to the acrobat page just to show you and if you scroll all the way down they have this area where it says try these acrobat online tools and one of them is PDF to Word so if you're trying to convert PDF to something else you could use that as well like you could convert it to Excel and then bring it into Google Sheets okay so there's a bunch of Cool Tools here again I'll put the link in the description and this works great so we'll just select our file and we'll choose the old Media Kit that we have on the desktop we'll open it up in Adobe Acrobat online and you can see it says the file is ready and I can sign in to download it for free so you do have to sign in but you don't have to pay anything so I just sign in with my Google account that I'm using and this is the first time I've used it on this account so I actually didn't know you had to do this so it's just creating me a new free account right now you might have to do this too so I'm kind of glad it came in the video okay so now we're signed into this Adobe Acrobat online we can you know we don't have to do the tour or anything if you look down this is kind of like it kind of functions like Google drive but you'll notice that we have this old mediakit.x okay so it has converted it to Microsoft Word we're not even going to check the steps I could open it now and see if the docx looks good but I I'm pretty confident that it is so what we're going to do is we're going to click on the three dots over here to the right and we're going to download it and so you'll notice it kind of is downloading up here so now we're going to do is we're going to go back into Google Drive so that's the other tab I have open here or window we're going to close out this document we're going to upload the new docx format so we go to new I'm going to go to file upload this time I'm going to go to my downloads folder you'll notice that I have old mediakit.x that's the one we want let's open that up as you can see it's right here you notice it has the w symbol because it's in word format so let's open it up this is kind of like the moment of truth and here we are now it's still in docx I know but don't worry so we can edit it right now okay because you can edit docx documents in Google Drive Google Docs so I could you know delete this picture or undo that and I can edit all the text all that I want so it is completely editable now if I do want to actually edit this not just in Google Docs the application but in Google Docs format we can do that we can just go up here to the file menu and we can go to save as Google Docs it will open up a new tab and you'll notice this one has dot docx now we have old Media Kit and this everyone this is Google Docs format and we've got our images we scroll down we have all the images in here we use the Adobe free Adobe Acrobat free online so now how do we go the other way around how do we take this back to a PDF so this one this part is easy and you don't have to use another tool we're in Google Drive Google Docs we made our changes let's say we changed some images change some text updated things now we can just go to file and we can go to download and then where it says download you could download it as any of the file formats but obviously we want PDF so let's download it as a PDF you'll notice that here it is should be down in my downloads folder and we have this PDF that we just re-downloaded this was the original one we converted it to docx we brought it into Google Docs we converted it to Google Docs and then we exported it back as a PDF all for free using online tools did not have to download any software so this is how you can work with PDFs in Google Docs I wish I didn't have to give you that intermediary step of using docx format but that is what works best and it's really an easy trusted way to do it so you just have to use Google Drive and either acrobat or word three very trusted and Reliable Tools I hope you found this video helpful if you did I would really appreciate a thumbs up here on YouTube if you want to see more technology tips and tutorials don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel that's all I have for you for today this is Anson from ansonalex.com

Channel: Anson Alexander

Views: 12,436

Keywords: .docx, acrobat, adobe, conversion, converting, doc, docs, edit pdf, file format, formatting, google docs, images, pdf

Id: hi1TVYOpgZU

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2023