How to convert a PDF to Excel
To convert a PDF to Excel, open the PDF to Excel tool and add your file — PDFER detects the text positions and reconstructs rows and columns into an .xlsx spreadsheet, all in your browser with no upload.
What extracts well
Clear, grid-like tables in text-based PDFs reconstruct best. Merged cells, nested tables, and complex layouts are approximated by clustering text into rows and columns.
Scanned PDFs have no text to extract — run OCR first so the numbers become real text.
Tools mentioned in this guide
Frequently asked
- Will the table columns line up?
- PDFER clusters text by position into rows and columns; clean tables line up well, while complex layouts may need minor cleanup.
- My scanned PDF gives an empty sheet — why?
- Scans are images with no text. Run OCR first to add a text layer, then convert to Excel.