How to Convert a PDF Table to Excel

Copying a table from a PDF and pasting it into a spreadsheet usually puts every row into a single column, or scrambles the order of values. A PDF does not store tables as rows and cells; it stores pieces of text at positions on the page. A converter has to work out the table structure from those positions.

The results depend heavily on the source document.

• Best: PDFs exported from accounting software, banking portals or spreadsheets, with clear rows and columns and selectable text.
• Good: reports and invoices with consistent table layouts.
• Harder: tables that span pages, cells with multiple lines of text, and merged header cells.
• Not suitable: scanned PDFs and photos. They contain images rather than text, so there is no data to extract.

PDF to Excel converts the document on PDF Utility's server and returns the spreadsheet to your browser.

1. Open PDF to Excel and select your PDF. Enter the password if it is protected.
2. Choose the output format: Excel Workbook (.xlsx), Excel 97-2003 (.xls), OpenDocument (.ods) or CSV.
3. Start the conversion and download the file.
4. Open it in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice Calc and review the data.

Choose XLSX when you will work with the data in Excel or Google Sheets. It keeps multiple sheets and basic formatting. Choose CSV when you want to import the data into another system, such as accounting or budgeting software, a database or a script. CSV is plain text with one row per line, so it is the most portable format.

Expect a few minutes of tidying, particularly for complex tables. A quick checklist:

• Delete repeated header rows that came from the top of each PDF page.
• Check that numbers are stored as numbers, not text. Excel shows a small warning triangle on numbers stored as text.
• Fix values that were split across two rows because they wrapped onto a second line in the PDF.
• Compare column totals with the totals printed in the PDF to confirm nothing is missing.
• Check date formats, especially between day-month and month-day conventions.

If the table you need is on a few pages of a long PDF, extract those pages first with Split PDF and convert only them. The spreadsheet will contain less clutter to clean up.