How to convert a PDF to Excel and pull out table data
Plenty of statements and reports arrive as PDFs: a bank statement, a supplier price list, a grade sheet or a sales report exported from an accounting system. Retyping that data into Excel is slow and error-prone. This tool reads the text inside a PDF and writes it into an .xlsx file, so you start from the data instead of from a blank sheet.
The method is simple: the tool reads the text layer of every page, groups words that sit at the same height into one row, and puts each text fragment into its own cell. All pages are stacked one after another on a single sheet named Sheet1, and the whole process runs inside your browser.
How to use it
- Drag a PDF onto the Drag PDF file here box, or click to choose it.
- Click Convert to Excel; the status shows "Extracting..." while pages are read.
- A file named extracted.xlsx downloads automatically.
- Open it in Excel or Google Sheets and tidy up the columns as needed.
What you get
- Each line on a page becomes a row, ordered from the top of the page down.
- Text fragments on the same line are spread across neighbouring cells.
- All pages end up consecutively on one worksheet.
- No formatting, colours or images are transferred, only text.
Practical use cases
- Moving bank statement transactions into Excel to categorise spending.
- Extracting a supplier price list to compare it with another supplier's.
- Turning a table of names and numbers from a PDF report into a list you can sort and filter.
- Recovering data from an old sales report that only exists as a PDF.
Tips before converting
- The tool depends on the text layer, so scanned or image-only PDFs produce an empty or nearly empty sheet. Run OCR on those first.
- Cells are stored as text; convert numeric columns to numbers in Excel before doing calculations.
- One cell's text may be split across several cells, or values may shift into a neighbouring column, especially with merged cells or multi-line rows.
- Headers, footers and page numbers appear as ordinary rows, so delete them afterwards.
For scanned files, use PDF OCR. If you only need the text in a document, try PDF to Word, and to turn the resulting sheet into structured data, use Excel to JSON.