PDF to Excel
Pull tables out of a PDF and into Excel.
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Accepted formats: PDF
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Quick facts
- What it does
- Finds tables inside a PDF and writes them into a spreadsheet as real cells, one sheet per document.
- Input
- Output
- XLSX
- Processing
- On our server
- Files uploaded?
- Yes, temporarily
- Account required?
- No
- Best for
- Recovering figures from a statement, invoice or report so you can total them instead of copying them by hand.
- Main limitation
- It extracts tables, not pages. A PDF of flowing prose produces nothing, because there is nothing table-shaped in it — that is a correct answer, not a failure. Tables drawn without ruled lines are the hardest case and may come back with columns merged.
How to use this tool
- Choose a PDF that contains a table.
- Press Apply to send it for extraction over an encrypted connection.
- Wait while the pages are scanned for table structure.
- Download the .xlsx and check the columns landed where you expect.
Why use iBuildPDF
This is the least predictable conversion on the site and it is worth knowing why before you try it. PDFs do not contain tables. They contain text positioned on a page, and a table is something a human eye infers from that positioning. The extractor has to make the same inference, and how well it does depends entirely on how the PDF was built — a table exported from a spreadsheet extracts almost perfectly, while one drawn by hand with tab stops may not be recognised at all.
How it works
Each page is examined for text laid out in aligned rows and columns. Where that structure is found it is written into the workbook as cells; where it is not, nothing is written. The file is processed on our server over an encrypted connection and deleted afterwards.
Frequently asked questions
I got an empty file or an error saying there was nothing to extract.
That means no table was recognised. It usually has one of two causes: the PDF is a scan, so there is no text at all to align into columns — run OCR first; or the content is prose rather than tabular, in which case Extract text from a PDF is the tool you want.
The columns are merged or split in the wrong places.
That happens with tables that have no ruled lines and uneven spacing, where the boundary between two columns is genuinely ambiguous. The data is all there — it is faster to split the column in Excel than to re-type the page.
Does it handle a table that runs across several pages?
Each page is extracted in turn, so a long table arrives as consecutive blocks rather than one continuous range. Removing the repeated header rows afterwards is usually the only cleanup needed.
Can it extract from a scanned bank statement?
Not as it stands — a scan has no text layer. Run it through OCR first and then extract. Accuracy after OCR depends on how clean the scan was, so check the numbers against the original.
Read more about this
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