How to Convert a PDF Table to Excel
A supplier sends their price list as a PDF, your accountant wants the figures from a PDF report in a spreadsheet, or you need to total a column in a statement. Retyping is slow and error-prone. Converting the PDF puts the table into Excel as real cells, so you can sort, filter and add up in seconds.
Check what kind of PDF you have
Try to select a number in the table with your mouse. If you can, the PDF contains real text and converts directly. If the whole page selects as one picture, it is a scan, and the numbers are only pixels; run OCR PDF on it first to add a text layer, then convert the result.
Convert to Excel
Open PDF to Excel and add the file from your device, Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive, up to 260 MB. Choose Excel (.xlsx) at the top of the Convert to list and download the spreadsheet, which keeps your PDF's name. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers.
Just need one table? Copy it instead
When you only want a table or two to paste into a report or an email, Table Extractor is quicker: it finds the tables in the PDF and shows them as clean rows and columns on screen, ready to copy. For importing into accounting software or a database, PDF to CSV gives a plain comma-separated file that almost every system accepts.
Bank statements have their own tool: Bank Statement to Excel is built to pull transactions into a sheet with dates, descriptions and amounts in separate columns.
Clean up after converting
Check that numbers are stored as numbers, not text: a quick SUM on a column will show it. Currency symbols, thousands separators or a trailing minus sign can stop Excel recognising a value; Find and Replace removes them in one go. Tables that span several pages may repeat their header row in the middle of the data; delete those rows before sorting.
Compare a few totals with the original PDF before relying on the sheet, especially after OCR, where a misread digit is easy to miss.