How To Edit PDF Files In Office Word 2013

Portable Document Format, popularly known as PDF, is supported on all major desktop operating systems as well as mobile operating systems. Plenty of free and paid apps available for computers as well as smartphones to view, create, and edit PDFs.

The main advantage of PDF is that you can convert almost any document type or picture format to PDF so that other users can also view the file on their computers or mobiles, without worrying about the file type. For instance, if you have a Word document and want to open the same Word document on a PC without Office suite, you can covert the Word document to PDF format and then open it with the help of any PDF viewer.

To help Windows users view PDFs without having to the install third-part tools, Microsoft has incorporated PDF support in Windows 8 as well. You can open PDF files with the help of native Reader app or install the official Adobe Reader app.

Microsoft Office, the most popular office software in the world, received PDF file support in Office 2007 (requires an add-on). As you may know, Office 2010 not only supports PDF out of the box (requires no add-on) but also supports saving documents in PDF format. Microsoft has improved the PDF support in Office 2013 and it now allows you edit PDF files as well.

Users who have installed Office 2013 can use it to open, create, and edit PDF without having to install third-party software.

Please note you can’t use Office 2013 to edit PDF files that have been write protected or files with read-only attribute. Also note that Office 2013 isn’t as powerful as some third-party PDF editing software and doesn’t offer all the features that you get in some third-party PDF editing tools.

Follow the below mentioned instructions to open and edit PDF files in Office 2013:

Step 1: Right-click on the PDF file that you would like to edit using Office Word 2013, click Open with option, and then select Word (desktop) to open it in Word 2013.

Step 2: You will see a dialog box with a message saying “Word will first convert your PDF to an editable Word document. The resulting Word document will be optimized to allow you edit the text, so it might not look exactly like the original PDF, especially if the original file contained lots of graphics.”

Click Ok button to continue opening the file in Word 2013.

Step 3: Upon opening the file, if the PDF file is downloaded from the web, a small message appears at the upper side of the screen with “Be careful—files from the Internet can contain viruses. Unless you need to edit, it’s safely to stay in Protected View.” Click the Enable Editing button next to the warning message to begin editing your PDF file.

Step 4: Once editing is completed, click File, click Save as button to save the file in PDF, Word, or RTF format. Please note that since Word first coverts the PDF to editable Word document before actually opening the file, you can’t actually save the changes to the existing PDF file. That is, when you press Ctrl + S hotkey or click Save button you’ll see the Save as dialog box.

So if you get “We can’t save this file because it’s ready-only. To keep your changes, you’ll need to save the document with a new name or in a different location.” message, please try saving the PDF with a different name or save the file in Word or XPS format.