About this tool
This free PDF to Excel converter finds the tables in a PDF and turns them into a real spreadsheet — a .xlsx workbook or a .csv file — with the rows and columns worked out for you. You see the detected grid on screen before you download anything, so you know what you are getting.
Everything runs in your browser. Your PDF is never uploaded to a server.
Features
- Automatic row and column detection from the page layout
- Preview the grid before downloading
- .xlsx or .csv, whichever suits what comes next
- One worksheet per page, or everything on a single sheet
- Page ranges — convert only pages 2–5 if that is where the table is
- Column detection sensitivity for stubborn layouts
Why PDF tables are hard (and what the sensitivity setting does)
It helps to know what a PDF actually contains, because it explains both the successes and the failures. A PDF does not store a table. It stores instructions like *"draw the characters 1 2 3 at this position on the page."* The neat grid you see is an illusion produced by careful alignment — there are no cells, no rows, and often no lines at all.
So this tool reconstructs the table from geometry. Text fragments that sit at the same height become a row. Then it looks down the page for x positions that keep repeating — the left edges where many rows happen to start a value — and treats those as column boundaries. A real table produces strong, repeated edges; a paragraph of prose does not.
That is what Column detection adjusts: the minimum horizontal gap that counts as a new column.
- Fine splits on small gaps. Use it when values that belong in separate columns end up jammed into one
- Normal suits most documents
- Coarse ignores small gaps. Use it when one column gets split in two — common when a column contains text with wide word spacing
If the first result looks wrong, changing this one setting fixes it far more often than anything else. It re-runs instantly, so try all three.
Common uses
- Get a bank or credit-card statement into a spreadsheet
- Turn an invoice or purchase order into rows you can total
- Extract a data table from a report or scientific paper
- Move a price list out of a supplier's PDF
- Rescue a table when the original spreadsheet is long gone
How to use it
- Upload a PDF — click the upload area or drag and drop your file
- Look at the preview — each page's detected grid appears underneath
- Adjust "Column detection" if the columns are split or merged, and check the preview again
- Narrow the pages if you only need part of the document
- Download as .xlsx or .csv
Good to know
- Nothing is uploaded. The PDF is read on your device and the spreadsheet is built there too
- Scanned PDFs will not work here. If the page is a photograph of a document there is no text to read — the tool will tell you. Run it through Image to Text first
- Merged cells and multi-line cells are where automatic detection struggles most: a cell wrapping onto two lines becomes two rows, because on the page that is exactly what it is
- Check the totals. Reconstructed tables should always be sanity-checked against the PDF before you rely on the numbers
- Numbers arrive as text if the PDF formats them with currency symbols or spaces; Excel's *Text to Columns* or a quick multiply-by-1 converts them
- CSV holds one table, so pages are stacked one after another with a blank line between. Use .xlsx to keep pages on separate sheets
- The .csv is written with a BOM so Excel on Windows opens accented characters correctly
Related tools
- Excel to PDF — the opposite direction
- PDF to Image — when you want the page as a picture instead
- Image to Text — read a scanned table with OCR first
- Excel to CSV — convert between spreadsheet formats
- Remove Duplicate Rows — clean the table once it is out
