How to edit a PDF on Android

PDF files are a de facto standard for dealing with documents almost on a daily basis. The grace of these files is that they not only help in reading the document, but they can also be edited. By editing we mean making changes to the document in a significant way, such as significantly altering the text, changing the layout, and even inserting and removing images from it. When we talk about editing, what we mean is to be able to make any alteration that we consider necessary without the need to have the original text document (many PDFs are text files of another type before being saved in that format).

I’m not just talking about adding annotations, highlighting parts of the text or writing on top of fields to fill in, but about editing any part of the text completely. There are many applications that promise to edit PDFs, but what they really allow you to do is add footnotes and highlight text; at no time can you alter the document as you need without having the original. Among these we find XodoPDF, Polaris Office or PDFElement, which advertise this feature with enough pomp to, as we say, not really have it (or, at least, not without going through the box first).

What we are going to offer you is a completely free, secure way that we know works 100% to edit your PDFs on Android. Let’s see it next.

How to modify PDFs with Microsoft Word on Android

First of all, download Microsoft Word for Android by clicking on the download button that appears below.

to download

Once you have downloaded and installed it, open it and click on the button Open:

Opening a document in Word for Android

Next, we will click on This device and we will select the location that best suits us (in our particular case, the internal storage of the phone):

Selecting the file location

There, we locate the PDF document that we are going to edit and click on it to open it:

PDF document to edit

When the document is open, click on the edit button that appears highlighted in the image:

PDF edit button

With this action, what we will achieve is that Word creates a copy of the document with which it can work. As soon as you open the copy of the document, click on the menu button and then on Save as. Next, we choose the location where the file will be saved and click on save:

Saving the copy of the document

Why do I have to save the copy again? Because if we don’t, the document will be read-only and we won’t be able to edit it. It is worth mentioning that it is convenient to log in with a Microsoft account (if we have one) so that it allows us to make all the necessary edits.

Once the copy is saved, we will return to the Word document. If we click on the pencil icon, we can begin to modify it without problem:

Document ready to edit

As you can see, edit, modify or write in PDFs on Android it is easy if you have the right tool. Now you have no excuse to start altering these documents yourself.