How to get a table out of a PDF and into Excel

Bank statements, invoices, price lists and reports all arrive as PDFs. Try to copy a table out of one and you usually get every value in a single column, or one long line of text. That's because a PDF doesn't really store a table, only words placed at positions on a page.

Convert it to a spreadsheet

1. Open PDF to Excel and drop in the PDF. It runs in your browser, so a bank statement never leaves your device.
2. Choose the layout: each page on its own sheet, or everything on one sheet so you can sort and filter it all together.
3. Open the result in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers.

Rows and columns are rebuilt from where the text sits on the page. Plain amounts like 1,234.50 or (45.00) come through as real numbers you can total. Anything that might be a code, like values with leading zeros, slashes or several dots, stays as text, so account numbers and dates aren't mangled.

When the table comes out wrong

• Tidy, grid-like tables convert best.
• Cells that span several columns, and text that wraps onto several lines inside one cell, are the hardest to rebuild. Expect to fix a few by hand.
• If the PDF is a scan, there's no text to put in the cells. Run it through OCR PDF first, then convert the searchable copy.

Statements and invoices are full of account numbers and amounts. Converting them on your own device means none of it is shared with anyone.