Oftentimes it is difficult and messy to copy-and-paste rows of data from PDF files to a spreadsheet like Excel. This online tool allows you to extract one or more tables of data into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet simply using an online tool.

How to Use

1. Upload a PDF containing a table, or a fillable PDF form.
2. If the PDF has multiple pages, choose the page numbers to extract.
3. Smart mode finds tables automatically. Choose a detected table to preview it. If it misses a table, try Lines or Text mode, or choose Custom to draw a rectangle around the table.
4. Check the extracted cells and edit any values that need correction.
5. Download an Excel workbook containing all detected tables, or a CSV for the selected table.

This tool works best with PDFs that contain selectable text. Scanned pages need OCR first. For fillable forms, it can export a table of field names and values.

Having trouble?

1. No table appeared? Check the selected pages. Then try Lines or Text mode, or use Custom mode to select a table on one page.
2. Rows or columns look wrong? Try another extraction mode. Smart detects the table structure automatically. Lines follows visible table borders; Text uses spacing and alignment.
3. Is the PDF a scan? Run OCR on it first, then upload the searchable PDF.
4. Need a different layout? Edit the downloaded workbook or CSV in Excel, LibreOffice Calc, or another spreadsheet program.

Technical Notes about this PDF to Excel Converter

This SuperTool does table recognition and parsing. This pursuit concerns the recognition and extraction of tables from a human-readable format (usually PDF) into a machine-comprehensible format (like Excel).

The work involves several parts, each with its own algorithm. The flow chart below is similar to what works with SuperTool’s extraction engine.

1. Identify the table boundary and the table structure including the headers, columns, and rows of the table. One difficult issue is classifying cells into “data cells” versus “header cells”.

Table Header Detection

The primary difficulty in accurately extracting machine-readable data from PDF tables is the diversity of table structures. There are tables with and without headers, nested tables (whose certain cells are small tables themselves), and even tables that include bar charts in them alongside numeric or textual data. Smart mode detects table structure and preserves rows and columns. Lines follows visible table borders, while Text uses spacing and alignment in PDFs with selectable text.

Types of PDF Tables

Most tables are either 1 dimensional or 2 dimensional. A table with 1 dimension has either column or row headers. A table with 2 dimensions has both. Those kind of tables make up the overwhelming majority of table types. Tables can have column headers that look like merged cells and/or headers across multiple rows.

The layout of a table can be encoded in text or image file (i.e., a PDF), while the logical structure (what are rows, data types, relationships between cells) of a PDF is not included in a PDF.

Check out a brief demo of how to convert a PDF to Excel.

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