You need to edit or reuse text that is currently locked in a PDF.
OCR or PDF to Word — which one does your file need?
These two tools look interchangeable and are not. Running the wrong one produces an empty document or a page of nonsense, and people usually blame the tool.
The one test that decides it
Open the PDF and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If a text selection highlights the words, the file contains real text and PDF to Word can convert it. If your cursor draws a box over a picture instead, the page is an image and there is no text to convert yet.
That is the whole distinction. A PDF that came out of a word processor or an invoicing system is almost always real text. A PDF that came from a scanner, a phone photo, or a fax is almost always an image.
Real text: convert straight to Word
Conversion maps the existing characters into a document you can edit. Expect the words to survive exactly and the layout to be approximate — multi-column pages, tight tables, and unusual fonts are where conversions drift.
Check the pages with tables before you send the result anywhere. That is where a converted document is most likely to have quietly moved a number into the wrong column.
Scanned pages: run OCR first
OCR reads the shapes on the page and adds a text layer underneath the image, so the document becomes searchable and selectable while still looking exactly as it did. Only after that does converting to Word have anything to work with.
Recognition quality depends on the scan. Straight, evenly lit, in-focus pages at a reasonable resolution recognise well. A photo taken at an angle in poor light will produce errors no tool can fix afterwards, so it is worth re-capturing a bad page rather than correcting recognised text by hand.
Always read back the recognised text on a page that matters. OCR fails in a specific and dangerous way: it produces plausible words rather than obviously broken ones, so a wrong digit in an amount looks exactly like a right one.
When you do not need Word at all
If you only need to find a phrase or copy a paragraph, OCR alone is enough — the PDF becomes searchable and you can select from it directly.
If the text is headed somewhere structured, such as a wiki or a repository, converting to Markdown keeps the headings and lists without dragging along the formatting baggage of a word processor document.