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PDF to Excel

Recover tables from a PDF into a spreadsheet. Columns are detected from the layout of the page, and you can check the grid before downloading.

Files never leave your device

How to use PDF to Excel

  1. 1Add a PDF that contains tabular data.
  2. 2Choose which pages to read, or leave it on all pages.
  3. 3Review the detected grid — each page becomes its own sheet.
  4. 4Download the .xlsx file, or copy the data as CSV.

How it works

PDFs have no concept of a table. What they store is text fragments with x and y coordinates, and a table is simply text that happens to line up. The tool reconstructs the grid from that geometry: fragments are grouped into rows by their vertical position, then the horizontal gaps across all rows are analysed to find the column boundaries that most rows agree on.

This works well on the kind of table that produces a PDF from a spreadsheet or a reporting tool — bank statements, invoices, price lists, exported reports. It works less well on tables with merged cells, wrapped multi-line cells or heavy visual styling, where the geometry is ambiguous. The preview is there so you can see what was detected before you commit.

Pages with no detectable columns are still exported, with each line of text in a single column, so nothing is silently dropped.

The file is read into your browser's memory, changed there, and handed straight back to you. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no queue and no copy sitting on a server afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

Why are some columns merged together?
Columns are found by looking for consistent horizontal gaps. When two columns sit very close together, or one column's values are wide enough to close the gap, they can be read as one. Widening the source table before exporting the PDF usually fixes it.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
No. A scan has no text layer, only an image. Run the page through the Image to Text tool first to recognise the words, though the table structure will not survive that route.
What file do I get?
A standard .xlsx workbook with one sheet per page, which opens in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calc and Numbers. You can also copy the data as CSV.
Are formulas preserved?
No. A PDF only ever contains the results of formulas, never the formulas themselves, so what you get is values.

Related tools

PDF to WordPull the text out of a PDF into an editable .docx document.PDF to TextExtract the plain text from a PDF, page by page.JSON to CSVFlatten nested JSON into a spreadsheet-ready CSV.Developer ToolsSplit PDFBreak a PDF into separate files by page range or one file per page.