Microsoft Word 2013 Training – How to Open and Edit PDFs

One of the newest and most important features of Microsoft Word 2013 is the ability to Open and Edit PDF files. Available through the Backstage View’s Open command, Word can open PDF files by converting them into editable Word documents. Word provides a Protected View for working with PDF documents, which provides security protection against malicious software embedded within the PDF. The Enable Editing command allows for the converted PDF documents to be edited within Word. Opened and Edited PDF files can be saved in various formats, such as DOCX and PDF, through the Save As command.

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Video transcripts:

Hello again and welcome back to our course on Word 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at one of the brand new features of Word which has come in, in Word 2013 and although in some ways it’s quite a small feature, it’s actually a very significant one. For a very long time the PDF format, the Portable Document Format derived by Adobe has been the standard format for the interchange of electronic documents. And although the various components of the Microsoft Office Suite have been able to generate PDF documents for a few versions now, it’s generally not been possible to open or edit PDF documents in Word or for that matter any of the other components of the Office Suite. Well, with Word 2013, you can open and edit PDF documents and I’m going to give you quick demonstration of that now.

Now what I’ve done in order to demonstrate this to you is I’ve actually downloaded a PDF from the Microsoft website. It’s a Microsoft document about how to deploy Office 2013. It’s in my Downloads folder. So if I click on File, got into Backstage View, and then with Open, go to My Computer, and then Browse, go to my Downloads folder, and there it is, Deployment guide for Office 2013.pdf and double click to open it. Now what happens is that you get a message here warning you, Word will now convert your PDF to an editable Word document. This may take a while. Now I’m sorry you can’t see all of this message on the screen here because of the resolution of the screen, but I’ll just move this message over so we can read the rest of it. The resulting Word document will be optimized to allow you to edit the text so it might not look exactly like the original PDF, especially if the original file contained lots of graphics. Now I can suppress that message. I don’t need to see that message again and I’ll just explain it to you. Although basically opening and editing PDFs in Word 2013 works absolutely fine, there are some features in the way that PDF documents are formatted, particularly in relation to graphics that are either not supported in Word or work a little bit differently in Word. So if you’ve got a PDF document and as I say particularly if it’s got a lot of graphics and you open that document, it may not look exactly the same in Word as it does in the equivalent Adobe software; Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader. But let’s click this one anyway and give it a moment to do the conversion.

Now if you’re going to try this yourself, you’ll be downloading a PDF perhaps from the internet. You need to be careful about where you get it from because PDFs can carry malware, viruses, etc. So I’ve downloaded this from the Microsoft website which I basically trust. But even then because of the security setup, I’ve got in Word which I’m going to talk to you about quite a bit later on in the course, I’ve got this document open in Protected View which basically means that Word enforces a level of protection and warning on this document to make sure that it doesn’t damage my computer system in any way. Now before I start editing, I need to make a conscious decision and tell Word of that decision; that I’m prepared to edit this document. So there’s a button up here, Enable editing. I’m going to click that. That warning about protected view goes away and I’ll be able to edit the document. So Word 2013 is now ready for me to edit the document and I can go in and just edit it in the usual way.

Now note when I’m editing that at whatever point I finish I can do File, I can do a Save. It’s actually treating it as a PDF document. Note in the header there, that it’s still got that same file name, PDF. If I do a File, Save As and then say to my own computer, by default Word will try to save it in .docx format; so the current Word document format which is absolutely fine because I can save it in .docx format if I want to. Alternatively, of course, I can switch to PDF and save it perhaps with a new file name in PDF format.

So it’s a pretty straightforward process and it works pretty well. There are a couple of issues mainly related to graphics, as I said earlier. The other thing that I’ve found can cause problems is filling in form fields in PDFs. But for the basic use of opening and editing a PDF document it works well.

I suggest that you give that a try, open a PDF document that you believe to be safe and just make sure that you can edit it and you may even be able to detect some of the issues with graphics and so on and things to beware of when you’re using PDF documents for input. That’s it on that subject. I’ll see you in the next section.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!