Getting reliable spreadsheets out of PDF tables
Bank statements, price lists, inventory reports and research data are often only available as PDFs. Retyping those numbers is slow and error-prone. PDF to Excel detects tables on each page and rebuilds them as rows and columns you can sort, filter and calculate with.
Digital PDFs versus scans
A PDF exported from software contains real text, so the converter can read each value and its position directly. These files usually convert with the highest accuracy.
A scanned PDF is a picture of a page. For these, optical character recognition (OCR) reads the text first. OCR runs in your browser using Tesseract; the first time you use it, the browser downloads the language data (about 2–10 MB), after which it is cached. Choose the OCR language that matches the document for the best results.
Reviewing tables before export
After analysis, the detected tables are listed so you can choose which ones to export. Check the column headers and a few totals against the PDF. Tables that span several pages, contain merged header cells, or have no visible borders are the most likely to need small corrections.
Export as XLSX for current versions of Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers, or XLS for older software that cannot open newer files.
Working with the result
Numbers are exported as values where they can be recognized, so you can use formulas immediately. Currency symbols, thousands separators and dates can vary by region; if a column is imported as text, use your spreadsheet's convert-to-number or text-to-columns feature.
Tips for accurate conversion
- Use the original digital PDF instead of a scan whenever you have it.
- Scan at 300 DPI, straight and well lit, if you must convert paper documents.
- Spot-check totals in the spreadsheet against the PDF before relying on the data.