PDF → Excel (CSV)
Use this free online PDF to Excel converter to detect and export tables from any PDF into a clean editable .xlsx spreadsheet. It is useful for accountants pulling line items from supplier invoices, analysts recovering data from a published report, students harvesting tables from a research paper, and anyone who has wished a published PDF table was a real spreadsheet. Drop your PDF into the upload zone and the tool walks each page, detects table-shaped content based on column alignment, and exports the result as an Excel file you can open in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice. Conversion runs in your browser using pdf.js — your documents never leave your device.
Click to choose or drag & drop a PDF
How It Works
The tool reads each text item with its position from the PDF, groups items into rows by Y-coordinate, and infers columns by X-coordinate. Works best on text-based PDFs with consistent column alignment. Scanned PDFs need OCR first.
How to Use This PDF to Excel
Extracting tables takes a drop and a click.
- Drop the PDF into the upload zone or click to choose a file.
- Wait while the browser parses each page and detects table-shaped regions.
- Review the detected tables in the preview pane, optionally toggle which pages to include.
- Click Convert to .xlsx to render the spreadsheet.
- Click Download to save the editable Excel file; the original PDF is untouched.
How This PDF to Excel Works
Extracting tables from a PDF is harder than it looks because PDF stores text as positioned glyphs, not as structured table data. The tool uses Mozilla's pdf.js to parse every page and walk each text-drawing operation, capturing the character, its font and its x/y position. A clustering pass groups nearby characters into words, and another pass groups nearby words into rows by their y-coordinate. To detect a table, the algorithm looks for repeating column structures — runs of rows where x-coordinates align consistently within a tolerance — and treats those clusters as table rows. Cell text is reconstructed from the words that fall inside each detected column. The resulting two-dimensional array is written into a .xlsx workbook via SheetJS. Detection works best on PDFs where tables are rendered as plain text with consistent column alignment (most reports, invoices and bank statements). It struggles when tables are scanned images (use OCR first), when columns are heavily merged or rotated, or when the layout is unconventional. Always cast an eye over the result before using it for analysis. Everything happens locally so confidential financial data stays on your device.
Last updated: May 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are my columns merged in the output?
The tool detects column boundaries by gaps between text items. If your table's columns are very close together, items get joined. Try a wider PDF source or manually re-split in Excel.
Can it handle scanned PDFs?
No — scanned PDFs have no text layer. Run them through OCR first.
Why is the row order weird?
PDFs don't guarantee text-stream order matches reading order. The tool sorts by Y-coordinate descending (top-to-bottom). Most tables work, but unusual layouts may not.
Will formulas be preserved?
No — PDFs store displayed values, not formulas. You'll get the visible numbers but not how they were computed.
Can I get an Excel (.xlsx) file directly?
The output is .csv, which Excel opens natively. Save-As .xlsx in Excel for the native format.