How many times have you found an onetime visitor PDF or image, and needed to gain quick access to the text within, only to find you lot cannot locate the editable version of the file, or copying and pasting is declining you? Or maybe you lot only demand to convert a PDF or image into a Word or LibreOffice certificate, so it can be used for another purpose.

Certain you can purchase software that will let yous to practise just that, but if you lot're a Google Drive user, yous already have that power at your fingertips. That's right, Google Docs does a pretty impressive chore of converting PDF documents to regular Google Docs. It'southward not perfect–it'south more an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for PDFs and images–but if you lot're looking for a ways to get to that precious text, this is a handy mode to exercise but that.

How do y'all practice this? Out of the box, it won't work. Fortunately, the trick to making it part is incredibly simple. Allow me show you how.

Enabling the feature

Open up upwards Google Drive and then click on the gear icon. From the drop-down, click Settings. In the resulting window ( Figure A), make certain Convert uploads is checked.

Figure A

Using the feature

Upload either a PDF or an image to Google Drive. The uploaded image doesn't automatically convert. In fact, it will remain exactly as uploaded. Once the file is in your Google Bulldoze business relationship, right-click it and select Open up with | Google Docs ( Figure B).

Effigy B

The file will then convert to text and open in a new Google Docs certificate. I've created a sample image ( Effigy C), using text from this article, and uploaded it for conversion.

Effigy C

The resulting conversion will include both the image and the extracted text ( Effigy D).

Figure D

You can approximate for yourself how well Google Drive did on the conversion. In this case, it hitting the nail on the head Word-for-word, Google Drive extracted the exact text from the paradigm. I tin can at present copy and paste that text, without having to type information technology out manually. That's a time saver we could all use.

The one caveat

If yous expect Google Drive to successfully open a PDF document, such as a W9 tax form, as an editable document, you'll exist disappointed. Certainly yous tin can upload the document and Bulldoze volition extract the text, but it will be just that, text. Google Drive conversion from PDF or image is really just a very powerful and accurate form of OCR.

Fifty-fifty with that caveat, this feature will go a long way to brand your daily workflow much more efficient–especially if you spend a lot of time typing out text from PDFs or images.