From a PDF table to a working spreadsheet
Bank statements, price lists, financial reports, timetables and invoices often come as PDF. You can read the numbers, but you cannot add them up, sort them or make a chart. Copying a table from a PDF into Excel usually puts everything into one column. This tool finds the tables in the PDF and rebuilds them as real spreadsheet cells.
Two layouts
- One sheet per page. Each PDF page becomes a worksheet with its tables and the text around them, in the same order as on the page. Good for reports where headings and notes belong to the table, and for documents with one table per page.
- One sheet per table. Each table found in the PDF gets its own worksheet, and text outside the tables is left out. Good for data that you want to analyse right away, such as a statement that continues over many pages.
Getting clean numbers
The converter detects the rows and columns from the lines and the alignment of text on the page. Numbers are stored as numbers where possible, so formulas like SUM work immediately. After conversion, it is worth a quick check:
- Number formats: decimal commas and thousand separators differ between countries. If Excel shows numbers as text, use Data, Text to Columns or Find and Replace to fix the separator.
- Merged cells: headings that span several columns may be merged cells. Unmerge them before you sort.
- Tables over several pages: with one sheet per page, a long table is split across sheets; copy the parts together, or choose one sheet per table.
- Tables without lines: tables that use only spacing, without borders, are harder to detect, and some columns may be joined.
Scanned PDFs
A scanned PDF is an image, so there are no numbers to read. The tool detects scanned pages and recognizes them with OCR on our server. The table lines of the scan are found as well, so the numbers land in real cells that you can sort and add up. Recognition is never perfect, though: a 1 can be read as a 7, or a comma as a dot. For important scanned tables, check the numbers against the original.
Privacy and limits
The conversion runs on our own server. Files go over an encrypted HTTPS connection, are converted and deleted right after; the XLSX is kept for 15 minutes at most. You can convert up to 20 files at once, each up to 100 MB and 500 pages. Password-protected PDFs are converted after you enter the password.
For text documents, PDF to Word is the better choice. To make a PDF from a spreadsheet, use Excel to PDF. To copy only the text without structure, try PDF to Text.