How to Convert a PDF Table to Excel or Google Sheets

Get tables out of a PDF and into Excel or Google Sheets: export them as CSV in your browser, open the file and save it as .xlsx. Free, no upload.

Copy a table out of a PDF and paste it into Excel, and you usually get every row crammed into one column, or worse, one long line of text. That's because a PDF doesn't store tables at all — just pieces of text placed at exact positions on the page. To get a usable spreadsheet, something has to work out which text belongs in which row and column.

Before you start: is your PDF text or a scan?

Open the PDF and try to highlight a word in the table with your mouse or finger. If you can select the text, it's a digital PDF and the table can be extracted. If the whole page highlights like a picture, or nothing highlights at all, it's a scan — a photo of the page — and no table tool can read it without OCR (text recognition) first.

Bank and card statements downloaded from online banking, invoices from accounting software, and reports exported from Excel or Word are almost always digital. Paper documents you scanned or photographed are not.

How to convert a PDF table to a spreadsheet

1. 1

   Open PDF to CSV

   Go to PDF to CSV and add your PDF. Each page is analysed in your browser; the file isn't uploaded.

2. 2

   Check the preview

   Every page gets a tab showing its rows and columns as a grid, with the number of rows found. Click through the pages to check the columns line up.

3. 3

   Pick a delimiter

   Comma suits most versions of Excel and Google Sheets. Choose Semicolon if your Excel uses a comma as the decimal separator, as in much of Europe. Tab saves a .tsv file instead.

4. 4

   Choose one file or one per page

   For a multi-page PDF, One CSV file puts every page's rows in one file, separated by a blank row. One CSV per page gives you a separate file for each page, bundled in a ZIP.

5. 5

   Export

   Leave Excel-friendly UTF-8 switched on so accents and currency symbols display correctly in Excel, then click the export button.

Opening the CSV in Excel or Google Sheets

Excel

Double-clicking the CSV opens it in Excel straight away. To save it as a normal workbook, choose File → Save As and pick Excel Workbook (.xlsx).

Excel guesses the type of each column when it opens a CSV, so account numbers can lose their leading zeros and long numbers can turn into scientific notation. If that matters, start with a blank workbook and use Data → From Text/CSV instead: it lets you set those columns to Text before loading the data.

Google Sheets

Choose File → Import → Upload, select the CSV, and pick whether to create a new spreadsheet or add a sheet to the current one. Google Sheets detects the delimiter automatically.

Tidying up the result

Column detection works from the position of the text, so clearly laid-out tables convert best. A few things are worth checking:

• Text around the table comes too. Titles, addresses and footnotes on the page become extra rows. Delete them in the spreadsheet — it takes seconds.
• Wrapped cells can split. A description that runs onto a second line in the PDF may arrive as two rows. Join them by hand, or edit the first row and delete the second.
• Merged or uneven columns. If two columns arrive in one, Excel's Data → Text to Columns can split them again.
• Repeated headers. A table that runs across several pages often repeats its header row on each page. In the single-file option, filter or sort to remove the duplicates.

When it won't work

• "No text found in this PDF" means the file is a scan or contains only images. It needs OCR before the numbers can be read.
• A password is needed to open the PDF. Remove it first with Unlock PDF — you'll need to know the password — then convert the unlocked copy.