Converting a PDF to Office formats you can actually edit

Every conversion out of PDF is a reconstruction. The page records positions, and the converter works backwards to a structure that could have produced them. How well that goes depends less on the tool than on how regular the original layout was.

Word wants flowing text. It does best with a report or a letter in a single column, where paragraphs and headings are easy to tell apart. Excel wants a grid, so it does best with a table that has visible rules and consistent alignment, and worst with a table held together by spacing alone. PowerPoint wants slides, and inherits the page shape of the PDF, so an A4 portrait document becomes portrait slides rather than widescreen ones.

Some things cannot survive the round trip at all, because the PDF never stored them. Animations and slide transitions are gone. Spreadsheet formulas are gone, and what comes back is the numbers they produced. Tracked changes, comments and macros were all discarded when the PDF was made.

Check the result before you build on it. In a converted spreadsheet, confirm that the columns split where they should and that the figures are numbers rather than text. In a converted document, look for text boxes: they are the sign that the converter could not work out the structure and pinned things in place instead.