How to Convert PDF to Excel Without Retyping
Bank statements, price lists, financial reports, and exported data often arrive as PDFs. That's fine for reading, but if you want to sort, total, or chart the numbers, you need them in a spreadsheet. Retyping a table cell by cell is tedious, and one mistyped digit can throw off every total that depends on it.
How to convert PDF to Excel
- Open the PDF to Excel tool and upload the PDF containing the data.
- Click Convert.
- Download the Excel file.
The output is a standard .xlsx file, so you can edit it in Excel or any compatible spreadsheet app, including Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc.
Which PDFs convert well
The tool works best on PDFs with clear tabular data: rows and columns laid out as an actual table. Free-form text extracts as plain text rather than structured cells, so a paragraph-heavy report won't turn into a neat grid.
A PDF made from a scan or a photo is a picture of a table, not a table. It has no text to extract until it has been run through OCR. If your file came off a scanner, use the OCR tool first, then convert.
Check the numbers before you rely on them
- Compare a few totals in the spreadsheet against the original PDF.
- Look for values that landed in the wrong column, which usually happens where the original table had merged or empty cells.
- Make sure figures came through as numbers rather than text, so formulas can calculate with them.
More guides
- How to Edit a PDF Online for FreeFilling in a form, adding a note, or marking up a page doesn't need desktop software. Here's what you can do in the browser.
- How to Add Page Numbers to a PDFPage numbers make long documents easier to navigate, reference, and reassemble. Here's how to add them to any PDF.
- How to Redact a PDF (and Why a Black Box Isn't Enough)A black rectangle over a name hides it on screen, but the text is often still in the file. Here's how to remove it for real.