PDF to Excel
Extract tables from a PDF into an .xlsx workbook — one sheet per page, ready to edit.
Quick answer: PDF to Excel: extract tables from a PDF into an .xlsx workbook — one sheet per page, ready to edit. Runs on our servers, files deleted within minutes, free, no signup.
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Table extraction quality depends almost entirely on how the PDF was made. A machine-generated PDF — a bank statement, an exported report, an invoice from accounting software — carries a real text layer with positioned characters, and the extractor can reconstruct rows and columns from it reliably. A scanned page, by contrast, is just an image of a table with no underlying text to read.
For scanned documents, run the file through an OCR step first to add a searchable text layer, then convert — otherwise you will get empty cells because there is nothing for the parser to grab. European number formats with comma decimals like 1.234,56 are recognized and turned into native Excel numbers, but a column that mixes formats falls back to text to avoid silently corrupting values.
Keep in mind that a PDF stores computed values, never the formulas behind them, so the workbook you get contains numbers you can re-formula in Excel but no live calculations. Each page becomes its own sheet. To go the other way and turn a finished spreadsheet into a shareable document, use the Excel to PDF converter.
Frequently asked questions
- How accurate is the table extraction?
- Excellent for clean, machine-generated PDFs (financial statements, exported reports). Variable for scanned PDFs because we don't OCR — for those, run our PDF OCR tool first to add a text layer, then convert.
- Will it preserve formulas?
- No — PDFs only contain values, not formulas. You get the visible numbers, which you can re-formula in Excel.
- Are images and headers exported too?
- Headers and footers become regular cell text on each sheet. Images are skipped because they don't fit the table model; use our PDF to PNG tool if you need the visual.
- What's the maximum PDF size?
- 20 MB upload and 60 second processing. Hundred-page tables work; thousand-page archive dumps will time out.
- Will it work with European number formats?
- Yes — comma decimals (1.234,56) are detected and exported as native Excel numbers. Mixed formats in one column fall back to text.