Convert a PDF table to Excel

A PDF does not contain a table. It contains glyphs at coordinates, and what you see as a grid is an arrangement that happens to line up. Every tool that gets a spreadsheet out of a PDF is inferring that arrangement back, and a good tool says so rather than implying the structure was in the file all along.

This works it out from geometry. Text sharing a baseline is a line of the table. A strip of the page that every row leaves empty is the edge of a column, which is why a right-aligned amount stays in its column when its left edge moves with its width. The tolerances come from the size of the text itself, so a table set in seven-point type and one set in fourteen are read the same way. A fixed threshold in points would find one and miss the other.

What it leaves out, and why that is the point

A page whose rows are mostly incomplete is not a table. It is prose, a cover sheet, a signature block or an address panel. Feeding it through the same clustering produces columns of sentence fragments. In a twelve-page statement, one such page makes the workbook untrustworthy because you cannot tell by looking which rows came from a table and which came from the paragraph above it.

On a page that does have a table, only the table is read. The title above it and the paragraphs around it are not rows, so they stay out of the sheet.

Pages without a table are left out, and the result tells you how many pages had a table in them. Ten of twelve is a useful number. A workbook that quietly included the other two would not be.

Where it will be wrong

Two things need a model of the page rather than a reading of it, and this does not attempt them.

A merged cell spanning two columns lands in one of them. Rotated text is read on the baseline the rotation gives it, which is rarely the one you meant.

A cell that wraps onto a second or third line is joined back into one cell when the rows sit further apart than the lines inside them, which is how nearly every table is set. In a table with no space at all between rows, the lines of a wrapped cell stay as separate rows, because nothing on the page tells them apart.

Both would be guessable, and guessing produces a spreadsheet that looks right and is quietly wrong somewhere in the middle. A sheet that is obviously missing something is a better outcome than one that is subtly incorrect, because you can see the first one.

What it will not do is silently drop a value. Two cells landing in the same column are joined rather than one being discarded, so a row that came out wrong is visibly wrong rather than short.

Continuation pages

A table running across pages is one table. Every page contributes its rows. When a page repeats the column headings, as most multi-page tables do, the converter contributes everything below them instead of adding the headings again as data.

You get one worksheet, not one per page. Twelve pages of a bank statement come out as twelve pages of rows in a single sheet, which is what anybody exporting a statement actually wants.

It needs real text

A scan is a picture of a table. It has pixels rather than glyphs at coordinates, so there is nothing to cluster and nothing will be found. If selecting text in your PDF reader does not work, run the file through OCR first to add a text layer, then convert it.

Nothing leaves the device

The document is read and the workbook is written by a worker inside your browser. There is no upload, no account and no server copy, which matters when the table you are extracting is a payroll, a client list or a set of financials.