Turning an infographic into an editable Word document

What becomes what

• Text — headings, labels, numbers and the short words inside badges ("A1", "3") — becomes editable text in text boxes at the same position, size and colour, in the closest standard font.
• Shapes — a coloured card, a header band, a rounded button, a numbered circle, a thin border — becomes a Word shape of the same colour, under the text.
• Pictures — people, cars, icons, logos, photographs, gradients — stay one picture, placed over the shapes with see-through holes where the shapes are, so nothing moves.

Everything is layered as it was in the original, which is why the page looks unchanged when it opens. Select a box to see which layer you are on.

The picture that converts best

Use the original export — the PNG the design tool saved — rather than a screenshot of it, and never a photo of a screen. Flat design converts best because a box of one colour is easy to recognise as a box; JPEG compression adds speckles around every edge that make the same box look like a hundred slightly different colours.

Size matters for the small words: text should be at least about 15 pixels tall in the image. A 1600-pixel-wide infographic is usually plenty; a thumbnail is not. If the image is a page of a PDF, convert the PDF itself with PDF to Word instead — a real PDF keeps its text exactly and needs no reading at all.

Editing it in Word

1. To change words, click into the text box and type. Each line or label is its own box, so a longer phrase may need its box widened.
2. To recolour a card or a band, click its edge (or use the Selection Pane on the Home tab) to pick the shape, then Shape Fill. The picture above it is see-through there, so the new colour shows.
3. To move a block, select its text box and shape together with Ctrl or ⌘ and drag. Pictures that belonged to it stay in the picture layer and do not move with it.
4. To start again from the words only, convert once more with the Flowing text layout: plain paragraphs, no positions, easiest to rewrite.

What stays a picture, and why

Anything that is not flat. A gradient, a shadow, a photograph or a drawing of a person has no single colour to make a shape from, so it stays part of the picture — exactly as it looked. Arrows and curved connectors stay pictures too.

Whole photographs. A photo of a car with text on it gets its text made editable, but the photo itself is never cut into shapes: a patch of sky is not a rectangle, and pretending it is would spoil the picture.

Words OCR could not read. A symbol, a very small or decorative word, or text over a busy background can be missed; it then stays visible in the picture rather than disappearing. Read the result against the original before you send it — How to check a converted document lists what to look at.