In this post, I will show you how to edit a PDF document, so you can insert a text, a signature, add or remove a page, and so on. All that for free.
Sometimes you need to edit a PDF document for the reasons I said above. There are plenty of applications and online platforms that offer this service.
But most of them are available for trial use, and they insert a watermark in the document. To get rid of this watermark, you need to purchase the commercial version.
Adobe Acrobat also offers to edit your PDF document, but it will cost you $14 a month.
I’m going to give three alternatives to edit your PDF document for free and without a watermark put on your document.
1. Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word isn’t free, but it’s widely used and probably is installed on your computer. So why not used it to export a PDF document to Word, insert text, a signature, delete pages from the PDF or add one.
Plus Microsoft Word is available for both Windows 10 computers as well as for Mac.
To edit a PDF document in Microsoft Word:
- Open the Microsoft Word editor, then open your PDF document inside Word. Or you can drag and drop the PDF document into word.
When you open or you drop the PDF into Word you get this message:
“Word will now convert your PDF to an editable Word document. This may take a while. The resulting Word document will be optimized to allow you to edit the text, so it might not look exactly like the original PDF, especially if the original file contained lots of graphics.”
This means that if you have a large PDF document to edit, Microsoft Word might take time to convert the PDF file to a Word document.
And if the PDF contains a lot of images, Word might not convert them properly because MS Word will focus on the text conversion.
Don’t worry and click Ok, Microsoft Word often do a good conversion job.
2. Once the PDF document is opened in MS Word, you can edit it as if it was a Word document; Insert texts, signatures, add or delete pages…
3. When you finish editing the document, you need to save it as a PDF document;
4. Click on the “Files” menu;
5. Click on “save as“;
6. Give your file a name, then in the dropdown list, select “PDF (*.pdf)” as a file type.
That’s it you have edited your PDF document in Microsot word for free.
2. LibreOffice
If you don’t have Microsoft Office installed on your Windows 10 computer or Mac, there is a free alternative to Microsoft Office.
This alternative is LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is a free Office suite that is available for free for Windows 10, Mac, and Linux platforms.
To edit a PDF document in LibreOffice:
- Download and install LibreOffice;
- Launch LibreOffice Draw editor;
- Open your PDF document;
- Make the edit;
- Save back the document as a PDF file;
3. Sejda
Sejda is an online PDF editor, that allows you, in its free version to edit up to 3 PDF files within an hour, limited to up to 200 pages or 50 Mb.
For a personal usage it is more than sufficient.
How it works?
- Click on the Upload the PDF file;
- Browse and select your PDF file;
- Now you can insert text, images, signature, annotations, etc.
4. When you are done, click on the “Apply changes” button.
5. Finally, download the edited PDF document. You can even choose to download it in your dropbox, OneDrive, or Google drive.
I personally avoid uploading PDF documents with sensitive data, like bank documents with bank account or credit card information on sites like that.
Even if for Sejda the service provider claim that they delete the uploaded documents after 2 hours. But who knows ?!