How ButDoc works, what happens to your files, and answers to the problems that come up most often when converting documents.
The basics: cost, accounts, devices and limits.
Yes. Every tool on the site is free, with no watermark and no paywall at the download step. There is no premium tier and no file limit that disappears if you pay.
The site is funded by advertising rather than subscriptions. We would rather say that plainly up front than let you discover it after uploading a document.
No. There is no sign-up, no email required and nothing to install. Open a tool, upload your file, download the result.
Because there is no account, there is also no stored file history and no way to retrieve something later. Keep your own copies.
Yes. Everything runs in the browser on iPhone and Android as well as Windows, Mac and Linux, with nothing to install.
Some preparation steps are simply easier on a computer — adjusting spreadsheet column widths, applying heading styles in Word, or rotating a photo before conversion.
Files up to 100 MB. In practice the limiting factor is usually your connection rather than the limit itself, since everything has to upload and then download again.
If your file is close to that, compressing it first is often quicker overall — try Compress PDF, Compress PPTX or Compress Image.
Every tool asks you to hand over a file, so here is exactly what happens to it.
Full detail is in our Privacy Policy.
No. Uploads and their results are permanently removed within 60 minutes and there is no backup on our side. Once that window has passed the file is genuinely gone.
Always keep your original as the master copy and treat anything you download as a working duplicate.
An honest answer: files are processed on a server, not entirely inside your browser. That is what lets the tools work on any device without installing anything, but it does mean your file leaves your computer.
For everyday work — contracts, invoices, CVs, coursework — the encryption and automatic deletion are appropriate. For documents under strict legal, medical or regulatory confidentiality obligations, desktop software that never uploads anything remains the safer choice, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Not while the protection is in place. An encrypted file cannot be read by any software without its password — that is the point of the encryption.
Open it in a reader using the password, remove the protection in the security settings, save a copy, and use that. If the file opens but blocks printing or copying, those are permission restrictions rather than encryption, and Unlock PDF can clear them from a document you own.
Document formats disagree with each other in specific, predictable ways. These are the problems people hit most often, and what actually causes them.
Almost always because the source is a scan — a photograph of a page rather than a document containing text.
The ten-second check: open the original and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If the text highlights, it is real text. If nothing highlights, or the whole page selects as one block, there is nothing to extract.
Scans need OCR PDF first, which recognises the letter shapes in the image and produces text from them.
A character encoding mismatch. A plain text file carries no record of which encoding it uses, so software opening one has to guess — and a wrong guess turns é into two strange symbols and makes Arabic, Cyrillic or Chinese unreadable.
Save the original as UTF-8 before converting. In Windows Notepad: File → Save As, then set the Encoding dropdown to UTF-8. In Excel, choose "CSV UTF-8" rather than plain CSV.
It cannot be repaired after the fact, so fix it at the source.
The column is narrower than the value it holds. Excel shows hashes rather than a truncated figure, and any conversion captures exactly what is displayed.
Select everything with Ctrl+A, then Home → Format → AutoFit Column Width before converting. One second, and it prevents the most common bad spreadsheet result.
A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores instructions to place characters at particular coordinates, so extraction has to infer structure from position — and it preserves the visual line endings of the original page.
In a word processor, use Find and Replace: swap double line breaks for a placeholder, then single line breaks for a space, then the placeholder back to a paragraph break. That keeps real paragraph divisions while removing the mid-sentence ones.
PowerPoint stores shapes in the order they were created, not the order you read them. Build a slide by adding the title, then the right-hand column, then the left, and that is the sequence stored in the file.
Check it before converting: Home → Arrange → Selection Pane lists every shape in the order it will be read, and you can drag items into a better one.
It is almost certainly part of an image rather than a text box — a pasted screenshot, an exported chart, or a diagram saved as a picture.
Click it in the original: if you cannot place a cursor in the text, it is pixels and needs OCR rather than conversion. Image to Document handles pictures, and OCR PDF handles multi-page scans.
Fonts. A PDF embeds the fonts it uses, so it looks identical everywhere. A Word document only names its fonts and expects your computer to supply them — and when one is missing, the substitute has different letter widths, so lines wrap differently and content reflows across pages.
The text is unchanged; only the spacing moved. Using standard fonts such as Arial, Calibri or Times New Roman avoids it entirely.
Because images are the weight, and text is not. The complete text of a 200-page report might occupy 300 KB; one photograph straight from a phone occupies 4 MB.
Scans and photo-heavy documents shrink dramatically. Text documents barely move, because there is little to remove. If a file is still too large, consider whether you need every page — extracting the relevant ones removes their weight entirely rather than reducing it.
Attachments are encoded for transmission, and that encoding adds roughly a third to the size in transit. A 22 MB file arrives at the server closer to 30 MB.
Aim for 15 MB or less for anything going by email, and remember the recipient's server has its own limit which may be stricter than yours. Upload portals are often tighter still — 5 or 10 MB, sometimes 2.
Several tools overlap in ways that are easy to get wrong.
Cropping sets a viewing rectangle. The content outside it stays inside the file and can be revealed by anyone who resets the crop, or pulled out by a text extraction tool.
Redaction removes the content itself. If the goal is confidentiality rather than tidiness, cropping is the wrong tool — and a black rectangle drawn over text in a PDF editor does not remove it either.
JPEG compression was designed for photographs. It discards detail the eye is unlikely to miss in soft, gradual tones, and it handles hard edges badly — and text is nothing but hard edges.
PNG for screenshots, diagrams, charts, logos and anything with type. JPG for photographs, where the loss is invisible and the file is a fraction of the size.
Converting a JPG to PNG afterwards does not restore sharpness. It preserves the damage in a larger file.
Yes, if you are sending it to anyone. A signature placed on a page can remain a separate layer that some PDF editors let a recipient move or delete outright.
Run the file through Flatten PDF after signing to merge it permanently into the page content.
It prevents accidental changes, not deliberate ones. PDF editors are common, and anyone determined to alter a file will manage it.
For genuine restriction, Protect PDF sets a password. Note that a password to open a file encrypts it properly, whereas permission restrictions on printing and copying are advisory flags that software honours voluntarily.
No. ButDoc is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Microsoft, Adobe, any other software vendor, or any governmental authority or agency in any country.
We support their file formats because those formats are open standards. That is the extent of the relationship.
Yes — it is how the tools improve. Write to [email protected] and tell us which tool you used, the file's format and rough size, and what you expected versus what you got.
Please do not attach the document itself. A clear description is more useful, and email is not a secure way to send anything confidential.
Requests are welcome and genuinely shape what gets built next. Send them to [email protected] with a note about what you are trying to do — the use case is often more useful than the format name.