Word to PDF Converter

Almost every free Word to PDF converter uploads your document before it converts anything. You can usually spot it, because there's a progress bar that says uploading and a line underneath promising your file gets deleted from their servers afterward. For a flyer that's fine, but for an offer letter with a salary in it, an NDA with a client's name on it, or the resume that carries your home address in the header, it's a lot to agree to just to change a file format.

This converter doesn't upload anything, so you can convert Word to PDF without the file ever leaving your machine. Pick a .docx and the whole thing happens inside this browser tab. No sign-up, no queue, no size cap, no watermark.

A few other converters run in the browser now too, so that on its own isn't much of a claim. What they don't do is tell you what they lost. They hand back a PDF and leave you to find the missing photo yourself, usually about a minute after you emailed it to someone. This one counts everything while it reads your file, and before you download it shows you what came across and what didn't.

One column is what made it: headings with their levels, bullet and numbered lists with their nesting, bold and italic, tables rebuilt as real rows and columns, links that still click. The other column is the part nobody else prints. Images, text boxes, headers and footers, footnotes, tracked changes, and anything else left behind, each with a number next to it.

Those numbers are what turn it into an answer. A two-page consulting agreement with a signature block and no pictures comes across whole, the report says so in one line, and you can send it without opening the PDF at all. A conference poster built out of text boxes floating over a background image comes across nearly empty, and the report says that too, before you've spent ten minutes wondering why the file looks wrong. Either way you know in about three seconds.

A couple of those losses are actually wins. Comments don't print, which is exactly what you meant when you said send them the clean version. Tracked changes resolve the way accepting them would: insertions stay, deletions go. And if your document has Chinese, Greek or Cyrillic in it, those letters can't be drawn by the typefaces a PDF carries by default, so they come out as question marks. The report counts them, so you find that out here instead of in front of a client.

Five steps, and most people only touch the first and the last. The conversion starts the moment the file lands, so there's no convert button to hunt for.

1. Drop your .docx on the box above, or click it to browse. Several at once is fine, and you can paste a file you copied in Explorer or Finder instead of dragging it.
2. Read the two columns. If the right one is empty, the PDF is a complete copy of the document.
3. Change the page setup if the defaults don't suit you. It opens on Letter with one inch margins because that's what most US documents want, and A4, Legal, landscape and the type controls are all right there.
4. Look at the preview. Those aren't mockups of the pages, they're the actual pages of the PDF, redrawn every time you touch a setting.
5. Hit Download. Load more than one file and you also get Download all as ZIP.

The PDF keeps the name of the Word file, so contract-v4.docx saves as contract-v4.pdf.

Some converters build a PDF by photographing every page. It's easy to do and it looks right, and then you search the file for a phrase you know is in there and nothing comes back. This one writes actual text into the PDF instead. You can select a paragraph and copy it, Ctrl+F finds words, and the resume screening software recruiters run can actually read yours. Those files also come out far smaller, often under a tenth of the size.

There is a catch, though. To make sure your text renders on any device that opens the file, the PDF is built with the typefaces the format guarantees, which is a Helvetica, a Times and a Courier. If your document is set in Calibri or Garamond, the letters are slightly different widths, so lines wrap in slightly different places and a page break can land a paragraph earlier or later than it does in Word. The content is all there, the exact spot where things break may move. If a document has to match Word's pagination line for line, open it in Word and use Save As for that one.