Is it possible to convert PDF to Pages on a Mac for free?

PDF documents are final-format documents meant for printing or viewing in a PDF Reader. They are not word-processing documents despite appearing so. What is your goal of creating a "file type usable on a Mac?" Usable for what?

There is a backend editing time and ordeal cost to using an online PDF converter to produce a Word DOCX or Pages document. You may spend an unacceptable amount of time editing the result to make it appear even close to that of the original PDF appearance.

On the Mac, only paid PDF Editors or Microsoft Word v16.31 or later, provide a reasonable means to convert a PDF to a Word document. You might be better served to go this route, even if you need to borrow someone else's Mac for limited conversions.

kallie Petdancer wrote:

Thanks so much! I don’t need to edit it or “do” anything with it. When I save it to “files” it is greyed out, and I can’t open it. I ended up saving it to Books and opening and printing from there.

Saving a PDF to your home directory or your documents folder or to downloads should work just fine.

Saving to a root directory or to protected areas or such won’t work.

Is whatever app you’re using to access and (try to) save these PDFs enabled for disk access? Apps can be granted (or denied) Full Disk Access, for instance.

Change Privacy & Security settings on Mac - Apple Support

Actually, PDF is a fully usable format on Mac. You can open your PDF file using Preview and make annotations if needed.

If you want to convert your PDF to a format compatible with Pages, you can use some online converters to convert your PDF to Word. There are many available online, most of which are free of charge. You can then open the converted files in Pages.

Additionally, if you have more specialized needs, you may also consider using dedicated PDF editors to convert your PDF to Word.

You are welcome. Threw me off with that convert to a file type usable on Mac… in your initial post. PDFs are already a usable file type on macOS with restrictions.

Apple's Preview can open PDFs for viewing or applying annotations, but Pages cannot open PDFs. You can drag and drop one-page PDFs onto a Pages document where it becomes a document object though. And as you determined, one can open PDFs in Apple Books too.