>I have a PDF document from which I need to copy a couple of paragrahs into a word document
>
>I dont have adobe - is there any way of doing this without having to buy software

Ah, for just a couple of paragraphs - don't use Acrobat, use Foxit. It has its own extractor, you simply click the hand icon to turn it into crosshair, i.e. change mode from mouse-pushes-page-around to click-drag-selects-text. Then just press ctrl+c and it will copy the text - now whether it will extract the text from compiled pdf or do OCR on the selection is its own decision, and is irrelevant. You end up with the text on your clipboard.

Select one block at a time, because if you select text from a table, text from various cells may get mixed up (which is the reason why I think it's OCRing it).