Financial statements, invoices, and reports often arrive as PDFs with the numbers trapped in tables. Our PDF to Excel converter is launching soon and will use OCR to read those tables, including scanned PDFs that are really just images of pages, and hand back data you can open in a spreadsheet. While we finish it, you can extract the content today with our live image to text converter or the PDF to text tool, then paste it into Excel. It will be free, require no sign-up, and your uploaded files are automatically deleted after processing.
Why convert a PDF to Excel?
A PDF is great for viewing but terrible for calculating. Once the figures are in a spreadsheet you can sum columns, build charts, run formulas, and reconcile records, none of which is possible while the data sits locked in a PDF. This is especially valuable for invoices, bank statements, price lists, and any report you receive as a flat document but need to analyze.
How it will work
- Open the PDF to Excel converter once it launches and upload your PDF.
- Select your language if the document is not in English. The engine supports around 12 languages.
- Let the OCR engine read each page, including scanned pages with no embedded text, and arrange the recognized cells into rows and columns.
- Download the spreadsheet-ready output and open it in Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice Calc.
What to do right now
Until the Excel tool goes live, use the PDF to text converter to extract the raw text from a digital PDF, or the image to text tool for screenshots of pages, then paste the result into a spreadsheet and split it into columns. If you need an editable document rather than a spreadsheet, the PDF to Word tool is already live. For background on getting tabular data out cleanly, read our guide on why OCR struggles with tables.
What to expect from the output
OCR is excellent at reading characters but does not interpret spreadsheets like a person. Digital PDFs with crisp text and clear gridlines will convert most reliably, while scanned, skewed, or densely packed tables may need manual cleanup. Always review totals and column alignment after importing, the same way you would check any automated data-entry result.