The second Automator action allows you to choose whether you want to save the text extracted from your PDFs as Plain Text or Rich Text. In most cases, you’ll want to check the second option, as this will retain formatting, such as bold and italic text. Word, Apple’s TextEdit, Pages, and most other text editors can handle Rich Text format.

Press Command-S. Give your workflow a name, such as PDF to RTF, and then choose Application from the File Format pop-up menu. Finally, click on Save. Launch this application, select a PDF file in the screen that appears, and then let Automator do its work. Open the file that appears—it will have the same name as your source file, but will end with the file extension .rtf. Open this document in Word and you’ll see the text of your PDF file, with text formatting but no layout (no columns, and so on). This text can be a bit messy, but you can now edit it or copy it and use it in other documents.

There is a plethora of programs that can convert PDFs to Word documents, retaining formatting and images. If you need more than just the text, and want to make Word documents that look like your PDFs, you’ll need to go this route.

One of the most effective is Solid Documents’ $80 (Solid PDF To Word For Mac)[http://www.mac-pdf-converter.com/]. It can convert a PDF into a Word document that retains much, if not all, of the original formatting. (The program can also convert PDFs to Apple’s Pages format, Excel, HTML, and more.)