How to convert a PDF to Excel

When PDF to Excel is the right choice

Bank statements, price lists, invoices, timetables and reports often arrive as PDFs, but the numbers inside are much more useful in a spreadsheet where you can sort, filter and add them up. Copying a table out of a PDF by hand usually pastes everything into one column, so a converter that rebuilds rows and columns saves a lot of retyping.

If the PDF is mostly ordinary text, such as a letter or an article, Excel is the wrong target — PDF to Word gives you editable paragraphs instead.

Step by step

1. 1Sign in to your free account and open PDF to Excel. The file is uploaded to our server for this conversion, and the page tells you so before you start.
2. 2Choose a PDF of up to 25 MB and 200 pages. For a longer document, use Split PDF first to keep only the pages with the tables you need.
3. 3Wait for the conversion. Convertora reads where each piece of text sits on the page and works out the rows and columns from those positions.
4. 4Download the .xlsx file and open it in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers.

Tidying the spreadsheet afterwards

Give the result a quick check before you use it. Scroll through each column to make sure values sit under the right heading, especially where the original table had empty cells or wrapped text. Rows that came out as one long line of text usually mean that part of the page wasn't laid out as a regular table — it is often faster to fix those few rows by hand than to convert again.

Amounts kept as printed text, such as "€1,250.00", can be turned into numbers with your spreadsheet's Find and Replace or its text-to-number options. Doing this yourself, rather than letting a converter guess, means a date or a decimal separator is never silently misread.

What comes out well — and what doesn't

Tables with fairly consistent column positions convert best: each value lands in its own cell, in the original order, and a table that continues onto the next page is joined without repeating its header row.

Values are never changed or invented. Plain numbers become real spreadsheet numbers; amounts with currency symbols, percent signs, thousands separators or dates stay exactly as printed, so check and format those columns before doing sums. Colours, borders, merged cells, images and formulas are not rebuilt.

Scanned PDFs

A scan is a picture of a table, so there is no text for PDF to Excel to read and you will get a clear message rather than an empty sheet. PDF OCR can add a searchable text layer to a scan in your browser; see turning a scanned PDF into editable text for what to expect from recognised text.

Frequently asked questions