Documents

Get what you need out of a document, without opening the program that made it.

Extract text from OfficeThe text of a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file, as plain text.Recognise text (OCR)The text in a photo, a scan or an image-only PDF, as plain text or a searchable PDF.CSV ⇄ ExcelFrom CSV to an .xlsx sheet and back. The file decides the direction.Markdown to PDFA .md file becomes a laid-out document, with headings, lists and tables.

When text is text, and when it is a picture

This is the distinction to make before choosing, and you cannot see it by looking. In a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file the words are stored as words: Extract text from Office files pulls them out without opening the program that made them — and without having it installed. What you get is the text, not the layout: tables and charts stay behind.

In a scan, or a photo of a printed page, the words are drawn instead: to software they are patches of colour, and no copy-paste will ever pick them up. That is what Image to text (OCR) is for — it reads them one by one. It is the only tool on the site that guesses, so always read the result back: on a cleanly printed document it makes few mistakes, on a skewed photo or handwriting it makes plenty.

The other two are conversions with no surprises. CSV ⇄ Excel moves between the spreadsheet and the format anything can read — useful when the person receiving the file has no Excel. Markdown to PDF is for people who write notes in Markdown and have to hand them to someone who wants a document.