PDF to Excel

About PDF to Excel

PDF to Excel writes the text of each PDF page to its own sheet of an .xlsx workbook. Every line of text becomes a row, and text that lines up in columns on the page lands in the same spreadsheet column. Text that reads as a number is stored as a number.

How to use PDF to Excel

1. Open a PDF that contains real text. A scan without a text layer gives empty sheets.
2. Select Convert to Excel. Each page becomes a sheet named Page 1, Page 2 and so on.
3. Save the workbook.
4. Check column boundaries, the header row and totals against the source page before relying on the numbers.

On a production

A rental quote arrives as a PDF with ninety line items that need to sit in the budget as numbers, not as a scan to read across. Retyping it is an hour and introduces errors; extracting the table takes seconds and the figures can then be checked against the original.

Frequently asked questions

How reliable is the extraction?

Tables whose columns start at the same position on every row convert well, with or without ruling lines. Right-aligned or centred columns can shift by a column where the entries differ in width, and running text between tables lands in the first column.

What happens with a table that runs across several pages?

Each page is read separately, so a long table arrives spread over several sheets. Joining the parts in Excel afterwards is usually a few pastes.

Should I check the output before using it?

Always, for anything financial. Compare a few rows and the column totals against the PDF: a value read one column to the left produces numbers that look plausible and are wrong. Amounts written as 1.250,00 or 1,250.00 are both stored as 1250.