PDF to Excel

Good to know

A PDF records where each piece of text sits on the page, not which row and column it belongs to. This tool rebuilds rows from text on the same line and columns from the gaps that line up down the page. The result is the table’s text in cells, not a copy of its formatting, so check it before you rely on it.

Works best with

• PDFs exported from Excel, accounting software, online banking or a web page, with one table per page
• Tables with one line of text per row and clear gaps between columns
• Plain numbers such as 1250, -12.5 or 1,250.00, which become numbers you can add up

May not convert reliably

• Merged cells and headings that span several columns: the text goes into the column where it starts
• Text wrapped onto several lines inside one cell: each line becomes its own row
• Pages with several tables of different widths, or text set in two or more columns
• Rotated or vertical text, which is left out and reported
• Cell colours, borders, fonts, formulas and merged-cell structure, which are not kept

Dates, amounts with a currency sign or percent sign, and numbers with leading zeros (such as account numbers) are kept as text exactly as they appear, so nothing is changed without you knowing.

Scanned PDFs contain pictures of text rather than text, and this version of PDF to Excel does not do OCR (text recognition), so it cannot turn them into spreadsheets. The separate Image to Text (OCR) tool can read the text from a scan, but it gives you plain text to copy or download as a .txt file, not an Excel table. Password-protected PDFs must be unlocked first.

The conversion runs in your browser; your PDF is not uploaded. For paragraphs of text rather than tables, use PDF to Word. To keep only some pages of a long PDF, use Split PDF.