PDF to Excel
Pull tabular data from a PDF into an editable .xlsx spreadsheet — entirely in your browser. Best for spreadsheet-shaped PDFs; layout is approximate.
Select a PDF
or drop one here — text-based PDFs with table-like layouts work best
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Best for PDFs that came from spreadsheets (Excel exports). Free-form PDF text with table-like layout works approximately. Merged cells, rotation, formulas, and cell formatting are not preserved — values only.
Your file is ready
Processed entirely in your browser — the file never left your device.
How PDF to Excel works on this page
Three steps. The file stays in your browser.
Pick a PDF
Drop or select one PDF. It's read locally — no upload step.
Cluster & convert
PDF.js pulls each text item and its position; we cluster by Y for rows and by X for columns to recover the table.
Download .xlsx
SheetJS builds a clean workbook in your tab — one sheet per PDF page. Open it in Excel, Numbers, or LibreOffice.
What "PDF to Excel" actually means
Converting a PDF to Excel means recovering the tabular data that's visually present in a PDF page and writing it into a real spreadsheet — rows and columns you can sort, filter, sum, or paste into another workbook. People reach for this when a finance report, a bank statement, or an inventory listing arrives as a PDF and they need to do further analysis on the numbers.
It's important to be honest: a PDF doesn't actually contain a "table" — it contains text drawn at specific pixel coordinates. A good converter infers the table structure from those positions. That inference works very well on PDFs that started life as Excel exports (the columns are already perfectly vertical), and only approximately when the original layout was free-form prose with table-like visual styling.
How this converter works in your browser
We use Mozilla's open-source PDF.js to parse the PDF locally. For each page, every text item is paired with an (x, y) position derived from its transform. We then:
- Group rows by Y-coordinate with a small tolerance, so slightly-misaligned text stays on the same row.
- Compute column anchors across the whole page so columns line up between rows, then assign each text item to the nearest anchor.
- Write to .xlsx with the open-source SheetJS package — one worksheet per PDF page, named
Page 1,Page 2, etc.
What converts well
- Excel-exported PDFs: columns and rows recover cleanly.
- Bank statements, invoices, inventory lists: usually clean if the original layout was a real table.
- Multi-page tables: every page becomes its own sheet.
What converts approximately (and what doesn't)
- Free-form layouts with table-like styling: rows/columns are approximate — expect cleanup.
- Merged cells: the value appears in the top-left position; the merge geometry is lost.
- Formulas: only the displayed values are extracted (PDF doesn't store the formulas).
- Cell formatting: number formats, colours, conditional formatting, borders are not carried over.
- Rotated text and charts: dropped — only horizontal text becomes cells.
- Scanned (image-only) PDFs: have no text to extract. Run them through OCR first.
Common use cases for PDF to Excel
- Reconciling bank statements. Convert a monthly PDF statement to xlsx, sort by amount or date, and reconcile against your accounting system without retyping a single number.
- Importing supplier invoices. Extract line items from PDF invoices into Excel so they can be uploaded into accounting or ERP systems that expect tabular data.
- Analysing financial reports. Annual reports often publish key tables only as PDF. Convert to Excel to run your own ratio analysis, charts, or year-on-year comparisons.
- Cleaning data exports. Some tools only export to PDF. A quick PDF to Excel pass turns those exports into something you can actually filter and pivot.
- Building a price comparison sheet. Extract product lists from multiple supplier PDFs into one master spreadsheet rather than copy-pasting cell by cell.
Privacy & security
Spreadsheets often hold the most sensitive data in a business — payroll, customer lists, pipeline forecasts, financial models. Most online PDF-to-Excel services upload your PDF to a server, run the conversion there, and return the xlsx. Because this tool runs entirely in your browser, no row of your data is uploaded anywhere. You can run the converter on an air-gapped machine after the first page-load. For a deeper comparison of the standard upload model, see our iLovePDF privacy review.
Frequently asked questions
No. The PDF is parsed in your browser by PDF.js and the .xlsx workbook is generated locally with SheetJS (the open-source xlsx package). The result is offered as a direct download — your file never leaves your device. You can verify by disconnecting from the network and running the conversion offline.
No — only the displayed values are extracted. A PDF stores rendered text at pixel positions, not the original Excel formulas. If the source cell was =SUM(A1:A10) showing 42, the resulting xlsx cell will contain the number 42, not the formula. To keep formulas you need the original .xlsx file, not a PDF of it.
Merged cells appear in the xlsx as their top-left value, with the merge geometry lost. PDF does not encode merged-cell metadata — it just draws the text in the merged region as if it were a single cell. Plan to re-apply merges manually in Excel if the visual layout matters for your downstream use.
Not directly — there is no text to extract. Run the scanned PDF through our OCR PDF tool first to convert the pixels into recognised characters, then convert the OCR'd copy here. Accuracy depends on the scan quality and language — clean 300 DPI scans give the best results.
PDF doesn't store "tables" — it stores text at exact pixel coordinates. We infer the table structure by clustering text positions, and that inference can be wrong when columns aren't cleanly separated, when there are merged cells, or when long values wrap onto multiple lines. You can usually fix the workbook in Excel with a few minutes of cleanup.
Tips for best PDF to Excel results
- Start with text-based PDFs. If the PDF was exported from Excel originally, the column boundaries are crisp and recovery is near-perfect. Free-form PDFs with table-like styling need more cleanup.
- Run OCR before converting scans. Image-only PDFs have no extractable text. Pass them through our OCR PDF tool first, then convert the OCR\'d copy here.
- Expect to do a final cleanup in Excel. Numbers may come in as text; widen columns to confirm. Use Excel\'s built-in "Convert to number" if you need to sum the values.
- Split very long PDFs first. If only a few pages contain tables, run them through our Extract Pages tool first to isolate the tables — conversion will be much faster.
- Re-apply merges manually. If the original layout had merged cells, Excel\'s merge feature gives you a one-click fix after the values are in place.
Related PDF tools
- Excel to PDF — the inverse: turn your edited xlsx back into a clean, paginated PDF.
- OCR PDF — make a scanned PDF readable before extracting tables.
- PDF to Word — for narrative PDFs without a clean table structure.
- Extract Pages — pull only the pages with tables before converting.