Two Modes, One Honest Trade-off
Turning a PDF into a Word document is really two different jobs. If you want the result to look exactly like the PDF — every image, logo, coloured header, box, rule, and column exactly where it was — use Exact layout. Each page is rendered at high resolution and embedded as an image inside a page-sized Word document, so what you see in Word is what you saw in the PDF. If you want to edit the words — retype a paragraph, change a number, fix a table — use Editable mode, which rebuilds every line as real Word text with the right font size, alignment, and paragraph spacing, and turns tabular runs into real Word tables with borders and proportional column widths.
What Each Mode Preserves
- Exact layout: page dimensions and orientation, every image and logo, background colours, exact position of every word, fonts as they appear, decorative graphics — pixel-for-pixel. Text is part of the page image (not flowing text), so heavy editing is limited.
- Editable: page dimensions, per-line font sizes, font family class (serif → Times New Roman, sans-serif → Arial, monospace → Courier New), bold/italic where the PDF declares them, left/centre/right alignment, blank-line spacing, page breaks, and tables as editable Word tables. Decorative images and background colours are dropped.
- Plain text: just the words, in reading order — smallest file, most portable.
Scans Need OCR First
A scanned document is a photograph — Editable and Plain modes will report no selectable text. Exact-layout mode still works on scans (it images each page), but the resulting Word file will also be image-only. For tabular data, PDF to Excel gives you the columns as a spreadsheet instead.