Guides · Updated August 2026
How to Convert a PDF Table to Excel
Bank statements, price lists, registers — data you need in a spreadsheet, trapped in a PDF. Since PDFs store positioned text rather than tables, extraction reconstructs rows from vertical positions and columns from horizontal gaps. Clean grid-like tables come out ready to use; artistic layouts need a cleanup pass.
One more reason to do this locally: the documents in question are usually financial. The method below never transmits them anywhere.
Step by step
- Confirm the PDF is text-based (text can be selected in a viewer). Scanned statements need OCR first.
- Open the tool and convert — you get both a .xlsx and a .csv of the detected rows.
- Open the spreadsheet and scan the numeric columns first: merged headers and wrapped cells are where extraction needs manual fixes.
- Use your spreadsheet's text-to-columns on any column that captured two fields at once.
Tips that save a retry
- Statements from the same bank have a consistent layout — once you've cleaned one month, the same fixes apply to every month.
- If the table has ruled borders and consistent columns, expect near-perfect extraction; whitespace-aligned tables are the fiddly ones.
Questions
Why did some rows merge together?
Rows are detected by vertical position; tightly-packed or wrapped rows can land on the same line. The .csv output makes these easy to spot and split.
Can it extract from scanned statements?
Not yet — scans need OCR, which is on the roadmap. The tool detects a scan and tells you rather than returning an empty sheet.