The Portable Document Format (PDF) was introduced by Adobe in the 90′s and as the name implies, PDF is simply meant to be a type of self contained document that you can distribute easily. It doesn’t matter what operating system or software you have installed, as long as you have a reader to view it, the document will always look the same. Unlike a simple text file, a PDF document can contain many elements including text, images, hyperlinks, tables, fillable forms and etc.

Windows 8 has built in support for viewing PDFs and most web browsers can also view and save PDF documents. There’s plenty of free third party tools like Foxit Reader, Nitro Reader, SumatraPDF or even Adobe’s own reader. If you want to edit a PDF file, a popular way of doing so is converting the document format into Microsoft Word format, that way just about anybody can then edit it without the need for specialized PDF editing software. If needed, you can later convert the Word document back to PDF.

Some products such as Microsoft Office itself, Google Docs and even Libreoffice can convert or allow you to edit a PDF but the results are often less than satisfactory. Here we list a number of free software or online PDF to Word format converters that can help you get a good result. Because results can vary wildly, we also run some tests to see which converters might be best for your particular documents.

Although Windows provides a safe and convenient way to safely eject your USB flash drive, there are no options to easily remount or reconnect the ejected drive. It seems like the only way is to unplug the drive and reinsert it into the USB port for Windows to re-detect and re-mount the USB flash drive. This can be very troublesome if the device is connected to the USB port located at the rear of the computer.