PDF to Word — what actually works
Two kinds of PDFs behave very differently.
1. Digital PDFs (text layer)
Exported from Word, Google Docs, or web-to-PDF. Convert directly with PDF to Word. Fonts and paragraphs usually survive; complex tables and multi-column layouts often reflow.
2. Scanned PDFs (image only)
Photos of paper. Run OCR PDF first to add a text layer, then convert to DOCX.