You’ve probably received a PDF file from a coworker or even your manager and had to make some changes (e.g. sign, annotate, highlight, add images, etc.). Finding exactly how to edit PDFs for free can be time-consuming. Your time is as valuable as mine, and wasting that much time is not productive.
After using numerous free PDF editors, I’ve narrowed it down to the best three. I’ve used them for several months, and they work most of the time.
PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It is the file format used when you need to save and share files that cannot be edited [except, in this case, we’ll break the rules]. I’m sure you desperately need to edit a PDF document, or you could just be browsing for tools – I do that a lot too. In any case, I have exactly the tools you need to get the job done.
Of course, that is the subject of this article. Over the past few years, I’ve tested several FREE online PDF editors and have narrowed it down to three that seem to get the job done about 99% of the time. Two of the three methods are cloud-based. The last one involves a tool that’s already installed on most devices, so if you use Windows or Mac, you probably don’t need to install any additional software [sorry Chromebook and Linux users]. But don’t worry if you fall into that category; these free online PDF editors do a great job.
The 3 apps I use to edit PDFs that I’ve found to be most useful are;
Of the three free PDF editors, Canva is the one I find most reliable. It allows me to edit PDF files for free even with the free plan. Here’s how it works…
Head over to canva.com and sign in – it’s FREE
If you already have a Canva account, you can skip this step. Otherwise, sign up for a free Canva account here.
Upload the PDF File to Canva
From the home screen, click on UPLOAD (located in the top right corner of the page) and then BROWSE for your PDF file.
Open the Uploaded File to Edit
I recently discovered Sedja after experimenting with several tools, and it is by far one of the best free PDF editor I’ve tried. Even the free version is superior to the likes of HiPDF, Small PDF, and PDF2Go. With the others, I could only do text highlighting, callouts, and a few other things without changing the text itself. One limitation of Sedja is that I can only apply text color changes to entire lines of text rather than word by word.
Using Sedja is pretty straightforward. Aside from the ability to edit PDFs, the software is packed with a ton of PDF tools and allows you to edit, compress, sign and fill, merge, and delete pages from a PDF file. The free version allows for documents up to 200 pages or 50 Mb in size, and you can complete three tasks per hour (I still think this is a heavy giveaway).
If you don’t want to upload your documents, they have a desktop version which you can download here (the file size is approximately 260 Mb).
The third and final program I use is Microsoft Word, which allows you to open your PDF file in editable Word format. A quick demo is provided in the video below.
Hopefully, PDF editing doesn’t have to be such a hustle anymore. If you found these tips useful, please share them with your coworkers and subscribe for more in-depth office productivity hacks.
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