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

Quick answer

Open DO101 PDF to Excel and drop in the PDF. It finds tables from where each word sits on the page, shows you a preview with a confidence score, and builds a real .xlsx with one sheet per page. It works on PDFs that contain text; a scanned PDF needs OCR first. Everything runs in your browser.

Open the PDF to Excel — free

Step by step

  1. 1Open PDF to Excel and choose the PDF.
  2. 2Look over the preview and the confidence score for each table.
  3. 3Download the .xlsx workbook — one sheet per page.
  4. 4Open it in Excel or Google Sheets and tidy anything the preview flagged.

What converts well

Ordinary tables with ruled lines or neatly aligned columns: bank statements, price lists, timetables, invoice line items, results tables in reports. Words on the same baseline become a row and words that line up vertically become a column.

What needs checking

Merged cells, tables inside tables, and cells whose text wraps onto a second line are where position-based detection struggles. That is why every table gets a confidence score and a preview before you trust it. Commercial converters run trained layout models on a server and do better on messy tables; this one does the job without your statement leaving your device.

If it finds no tables

Either the PDF is a scan — try selecting a word; if you cannot, run it through PDF OCR first — or the data is laid out as free text rather than aligned columns.

Cleaning up in Excel afterwards

Numbers copied from PDFs often arrive as text — right-align them to check. Select the column and use Data › Text to Columns › Finish to turn them back into numbers, or multiply by 1 in a helper column. Totals and subtotal rows from the PDF come across as ordinary rows, so delete them before summing, or you will count everything twice. A statement that runs across several pages lands on several sheets; copy them under one another to get a single table.

Frequently asked questions

Is it a real Excel file or a CSV?

A real .xlsx workbook, with one sheet per page of the PDF.

Is my bank statement uploaded?

No. The PDF is read and the workbook built inside your browser.

The tool for the job

PDF to ExcelRuns in your browser

Recover tables from a PDF into a spreadsheet.