How to get tables out of a PDF and into Excel

Updated

Copying a table out of a PDF usually gives you one long column of text, or numbers that Excel treats as words. Here is how to get a clean spreadsheet you can sort, filter and sum.

Convert PDF tables to Excel →

Steps

  1. Open PDF to Excel and choose the PDF — an invoice, bank statement, price list or report.
  2. Keep “Tables — clean spreadsheet” selected.
  3. Convert, check the summary of what was found, and download the .xlsx workbook.

What you get

  • One sheet per table, named after the heading above it, with a linked index sheet.
  • Numbers, currencies, percentages, negatives in brackets and dates as real Excel values — European formats such as 1.234,56 included.
  • Codes such as 00123 kept as text, so leading zeros survive.
  • Headers frozen and filtered; columns sized to fit.
  • Totals checked against the rows above them: the ones that add up become live SUM formulas, and any that do not are reported.

Scanned statements

Turn on OCR for scanned pages. For crooked scans, run Fix PDF layout first — straight lines of text make straight columns.

Tools for this job

PDF to Excel · PDF to Word · OCR PDF · Extract text

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Black out sensitive passages — and remove them for good.

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Make the file smaller, with the trade-off you choose.

Repair PDF

Fix a damaged or corrupt PDF that will not open properly.