When to turn a PDF into a spreadsheet
A price list or statement arrives as a PDF and you need to total it or sort it — so you start retyping numbers one by one. At a few dozen rows that stops being reasonable.
This tool finds the tables in a PDF and writes them into a spreadsheet. The file goes to our conversion server and is deleted the moment it finishes.
How to use it
- 1Upload a PDF containing tables. Up to 30MB.
- 2Press Convert to Excel and the server hunts for tables.
- 3Open the spreadsheet and fix any cells that landed in the wrong place.
Common questions
- The columns came out scrambled.
- Check whether the table has ruling lines — that single thing decides most of the result. Converting the same table twice, once with borders and once without, the ruled version put all ten columns exactly where they belonged, while the unruled one merged two headings into one cell and split a figure down the middle. If you can edit the source, add borders, re-export the PDF and try again.
- Does this one stay in my browser too?
- No. This tool sends your file to our conversion server, because working out where a table's edges are is not something a browser can do. Both the original and the result are deleted as soon as it finishes.
- It says no tables were found.
- That's what you get when the document has nothing table-shaped in it. For prose, PDF to Word is the better fit.
- Does it work on scanned PDFs?
- Not directly — a scan is a photograph of a page, with no text in it. Run it through Scanned PDF Text Recognition first, though, and tables can be found in the result.
- Do formulas and formatting survive?
- No. A PDF holds the calculated results, never the calculations. You get the text and numbers; totals need to be re-entered as formulas in Excel.