Retyping a table from a PDF into Excel is slow and error-prone — a misread digit in a financial statement is the kind of mistake that’s easy to make and annoying to catch. If the numbers already exist in the PDF, the faster path is extracting them directly into real spreadsheet cells.
How to convert PDF to Excel in 3 steps
Step 1: Upload your PDF
Go to the PDF to Excel page and add your file, up to 25 MB.
Step 2: Let the tables get extracted
The converter reads the tables inside your PDF and rebuilds them as real rows and columns — not an image, not a text dump, but cells you can actually sort, filter, and recalculate.
Step 3: Download your spreadsheet
Download the .xlsx file and open it in Excel, Google Sheets, or any spreadsheet app.
What kinds of PDFs work best?
This works most reliably on PDFs that contain genuine tabular data:
- Invoices and receipts
- Bank and account statements
- Reports and price lists
- Any PDF exported from accounting or spreadsheet software
Text-based PDFs — the kind where you can select and highlight the text with your cursor — convert most accurately, because the numbers already exist as real characters, not pixels.
What about a scanned PDF to Excel?
A scanned PDF is harder: the numbers are a photograph of a table rather than real text, so recognition is less reliable. For the cleanest result, use a PDF whose text you can select. If a page has no detectable table structure, it will come through as plain rows of text instead of a structured grid — still useful, just not neatly gridded.
What if my PDF is password-protected?
Remove the password first with Unlock PDF (you need to know it) — an encrypted file can’t be read by any converter, including this one.
After extracting your tables
- Compress the original PDF if you also need to keep and share it
- Convert other formats: PDF to Word or PDF to PowerPoint
- Going the other way? Excel to PDF turns a spreadsheet back into a shareable PDF
Ready? Try the free PDF to Excel tool now — no sign-up, no watermark, and your file is never stored.