About PDF to Excel
Numbers locked in a PDF are a nuisance. A bank statement, a price list, a table in a report: the figures are right there, and you cannot sort, sum or paste them. Retyping them is slow and invites mistakes.
This tool reads the position of the text on each page and groups it into rows and columns, then writes the result as an Excel spreadsheet with one sheet per page. It runs in your browser, so your statements and reports are not uploaded.
How to convert a PDF to Excel
- Choose a PDF. It should be a document made by a program, where the text is real text.
- Press the button. The tool reads the text on every page and arranges it into rows and columns by where it sits.
- Read the result line. It reports how many sheets were made and how many rows the first one has, which is a quick check that it found your table.
- Save the spreadsheet and open it. Check the first few rows against the PDF, especially columns of numbers and negative values.
- Clean up where needed: merge or split columns, fix any cell that came out joined to its neighbour.
When you would use it
- Getting transaction lists out of a bank or card statement for bookkeeping.
- Moving a price list or a schedule from a PDF into a sheet you can sort.
- Extracting a data table from a report to build a chart.
- Reading a long table into a spreadsheet to search and filter it.
- Collecting figures from several PDFs into one workbook.
What it will not do
- It works from where the text sits. Tables with clear columns come out well. Tables without lines, with merged cells or with text wrapped over several lines can come out misaligned.
- A scanned PDF has no text to read. Run OCR PDF on it first.
- It produces one sheet per page, so a table that spans pages arrives as separate sheets that you join yourself.
- It carries values and text, not formulas or formatting like the original colours.
- It reads the page text only; charts and pictures are not turned into data.
How it compares
Copying a table out of a PDF viewer and pasting it into a spreadsheet works for a small table, and usually collapses everything into one column. Reading the positions of the text keeps the columns apart.
Services that use machine learning to find tables can do better on messy layouts. They also upload the document. For a statement full of account details, a conversion that runs on your computer is the more comfortable choice.
Tips
- Check totals after converting. A single misplaced digit is easy to overlook, and a total that does not match tells you straight away.
- For a long document, split out the pages with the table first, so that you work with a smaller workbook.