How to Convert PDF to Excel Online, Free
Numbers stuck in a PDF? Drop it on PDF to Excel, download a spreadsheet, and give it a quick look before you start adding things up.
The numbers you need are sitting in a PDF: a bank statement, a supplier's price list, last quarter's report. You can read them, but you can't sort them or add them up, and retyping them cell by cell is how a whole afternoon disappears. Here's how to convert a PDF to Excel instead: drop it on our PDF to Excel tool and download a spreadsheet.
How to convert a PDF to Excel
- Open PDF to Excel.
- Drag your PDF into the box that says Drag & Drop or Choose File to Upload, or click the box to pick a file. The Google Drive and Dropbox buttons grab one from there instead.
- Your PDF opens in our editor. Click Download at the top.
- Pick Excel from the list, and your .xlsx file downloads.
Downloading the file needs a free account. File size limits and the rest are in the Help Center.
What you get back
An .xlsx file, the regular Excel format, so it opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice. The tables in your PDF come back as rows and columns you can sort, filter and total.
Give it a quick look before you rely on it:
- Headers: is each column's heading in one cell, at the top?
- Merged cells: a heading that spanned several columns in the PDF can land in a merged cell. Unmerge it if it gets in the way of sorting.
- Numbers: Excel lines real numbers up on the right and text on the left. If a column of amounts hugs the left edge, those cells are text and won't add up until you fix them.
If your PDF is a scan or a photo
A PDF you downloaded from your bank or exported from some software is the easy case: the numbers in it are already text. A scan or a phone photo is different. It's a picture of a table, not a table.
For those, run the file through OCR PDF first, so the text in it becomes real text you can select. Then bring that PDF to PDF to Excel.
