What we don't do, and why

Most tool sites tell you what they do. This page is the other half: what Cheeky Tools will not do — including a few things you may have come here looking for — and the reason for each. Nearly all of it follows from two rules. Your files never leave your device. And there will never be anything here to pay for.

We don't convert PDF to Word, PDF to Excel, or Office files to PDF

These are some of the most searched-for file conversions there are, and we have left them out on purpose. Doing them well means your document leaving your device, and that is the one thing this site does not ask of you.

Why a browser can't do it well

A PDF is not a document in the way a Word file is. It is a set of instructions for drawing a page: this letter at this position, a line from here to there. It does not record which lines make up a paragraph, where a column ends or which boxes form a table — and a scanned page is only a picture of text, with no text in it at all.

Turning that back into an editable document is reconstruction. Something has to guess the paragraphs, rebuild the tables, match the fonts and, for a scan, read the words off the image. The software that does this well is large and has taken years to get right. A web page can pull the raw text out of a PDF, but not rebuild the document around it. We could ship that and call it "PDF to Word". It would be a text dump inside a Word file, and the name would be a lie.

What offering it would mean

Free sites that do convert PDF to Word nearly all work the same way: your file is uploaded to their servers, converted on a machine you cannot see, and kept for as long as their policy says. And the documents people convert are rarely the harmless ones. They are bank statements, signed contracts, payslips, medical reports and ID scans. We would rather point you at something that keeps the file on your own computer than be one more place it goes.

How to do it without uploading anything

• PDF to Word. Microsoft Word on a computer opens a PDF directly and turns it into an editable document on your machine: File, then Open, and choose the PDF. LibreOffice, which is free, opens PDFs for editing on your machine too.
• PDF to Excel. Excel for Microsoft 365 on Windows can pull tables out of a PDF: Data, then Get Data, From File, From PDF.
• Word, Excel or PowerPoint to PDF. Every office suite saves as PDF — in Word it is File, then Save As, and choose PDF as the format. Failing that, any computer can print to PDF: choose "Microsoft Print to PDF" as the printer on Windows, or "Save as PDF" from the PDF menu in the print dialog on a Mac.

Google Docs will open a PDF as well, but it does that by uploading the file to Google. For plenty of documents that is fine; it is just worth knowing that is what happens. And none of these is perfect — a complicated layout comes out of every converter a little wrong. That is the nature of the conversion, not a fault in the one you picked.

We don't upload your files, for anything

The image and PDF tools do their work in the browser tab you are looking at. The file is read from your device, processed in the page and handed back to you. It is never sent to us.

That has a cost, and we would rather name it than hide it. Our PDF compressor cannot shrink the pictures inside a page while leaving the text sharp, the way desktop software built on Ghostscript can, so a server-side compressor will get some files smaller than we can. That trade is decided, and it is permanent: the weaker version that keeps your file is the product.

You can check the rule rather than take it on trust. Open the network tab in your browser's developer tools and use one of the tools. You will see the page load and, once you use it, one or two small requests recording which tool was used — its name and nothing else. You will not see a request carrying your file.

The exception is the two SEO tools. To check a website our server has to fetch it, so you give us its address. That is a web address you typed, not a file from your device, and the privacy page says what happens to it.

We don't charge, and there is nothing to cancel

No paid plan, no premium tier, no free trial, no card details, no features held back for people who pay. That is not a description of how things are today; it is a decision about how they will always be. There is no billing system behind this site to add one to.

The most common complaint about paid tools in this category is not the price. It is the charge somebody did not expect, after a trial they thought they had cancelled. A site with nothing to pay for cannot do that to you.

So how does it pay for itself? Almost every tool runs in your browser and costs close to nothing to serve. Krimsonhouse builds AI and automation systems for businesses, and this site is one of the ways people find us. The only tool that asks for an email address is the full SEO audit, because it sends you a report.

We don't show ads

None, on any page, including the calculators. And nothing is put between you and what you made. A QR code from our generator contains exactly the link, payment details or text you entered, with no redirect through us — so nobody can put an ad in front of the people who scan it, and it keeps working even if this site does not.

We don't cap, watermark or gate the result

The calculators and file tools have no daily limit, add no watermark and never ask for an email address before showing you an answer. The only limit is your device: everything is held in memory, so a very large PDF can fail on an old phone and work on a laptop.

The two SEO tools are the exception, because every run costs real money — fetching pages from somebody else's site and, for the audit, calling Google's PageSpeed service. The checker allows 6 checks a minute and 40 an hour from one address. The audit allows 3 an hour per address and 5 a day per email address, and asks for that email because it sends the report there.

We don't record what you type, or anything about your files

We do count how the tools get used: whether a tool was used, whether a file was processed, a result copied or an error shown, and on which tool. We never record the numbers you enter, a file's name or its contents. The privacy page sets out exactly what is collected and how long it is kept.

If we get this wrong

If you catch a tool doing something this page says it does not, that is a bug, and we want to hear about it: write to cheekytools@krimsonhouse.com.