Drop the PDF, see the detected table, download the .xlsx. No copy-paste column-alignment battle, no Text-to-Columns wizard, no retyping. Works on text-native PDFs with a visible column structure — one page becomes one Excel sheet. The whole thing runs in your browser; your file never leaves your device.
From PDF to Excel-ready table in under 30 seconds for most documents.
If detection looks wrong on the preview — columns merged, rows split, headers lost — that's a signal the PDF has a complex layout and a paid layout-aware tool like Acrobat Pro's Export to Excel would do better. We'd rather you know that up front than download a mess.
If you've ever copied a table from a PDF, pasted into Excel, and watched everything land in column A, you know the problem.
Visually there are columns, but under the hood the PDF is positioning each cell's text at specific x-coordinates — there's no tab or comma separating them. Copy-paste flattens everything into one line.
The Data > Text to Columns wizard in Excel needs a consistent delimiter. In a pasted PDF table, the delimiter is sometimes a space, sometimes multiple spaces — you spend more time tweaking the import than the data is worth.
A product name like "Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones" contains spaces, so space-delimited splitting puts each word in its own cell. Now you're manually re-assembling descriptions.
We read where each character sits on the page. Column detection is based on x-position, so a space inside a description does not become a column break. Column A stays Column A; "Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones" lives in one cell.
| Output file | .xlsx — opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, LibreOffice Calc |
|---|---|
| Sheets | One sheet per PDF page. Named "Page 1", "Page 2", etc. Rename after download if you want. |
| Columns | Detected from actual x-coordinates of text on the page. If your table has 4 visible columns, you'll typically get 4 columns in the sheet. |
| Rows | One row per visual row on the page. Header rows are included at the top. |
| Numbers | Come through as text. Use Find & Replace to strip currency symbols, then convert the column to number format if you need formulas. |
| Merged cells | Visually merged cells in the PDF come through as text in one row, not as Excel merged cells. Cosmetic; easy to re-merge in Excel if needed. |
| Preview limit | The browser preview shows the first 200 rows per sheet; the downloaded .xlsx contains everything. |
$19.99/mo. Best accuracy on complex tables, handles OCR for scanned PDFs, layout-aware column detection. Overkill for one-off tasks. Uploads to Adobe Cloud unless you change defaults.
Free. Copy from the PDF, paste into Sheets with Paste Special > Values Only. Column alignment usually still breaks, so you run Data > Split text to columns afterward. 5 minutes of fiddling per table.
Included with a Microsoft 365 subscription. Works locally on text-native PDFs, good accuracy. A solid option if you're already paying for 365.
Free and always available, but usually produces one mashed column. Works on very simple one-column lists; anything with real columns needs extra cleanup.
Free, runs locally, visual "draw-a-box" selection for tables. More control than heuristic tools. Requires a Java install and a minute to learn.
Free, browser-only, no install, no upload. Drop the PDF, see the table, download the .xlsx. Heuristic detection — good for clear column layouts, imperfect on complex tables.
Drop the PDF in. Detection runs instantly.
Copy the table to Excel
No account, no upload.
When you select a PDF table and paste into Excel, text lands in one column — there are no tab characters between fields, so Excel can't split the data. You can fix it with Text to Columns, but the delimiter is often inconsistent: sometimes a space, sometimes multiple spaces. Our tool reads x-coordinates from the PDF directly, so it knows where columns are even when copy-paste would be ambiguous.
The tool treats the whole page as one sheet. If two tables happen to share column positions, they'll merge into one sheet with stacked rows. If they have different column layouts, column detection will be inaccurate for both. Best practice: split the page to a one-page PDF containing only the table you want, then convert. Alternatively, delete the rows you don't need after extraction.
No. The whole process runs in your browser. The PDF is read with pdfjs, clustered into rows and columns locally, and the .xlsx is built in JavaScript memory. Zero network requests during conversion — verify in DevTools Network tab.
Not with this tool. A scanned PDF is an image-only PDF — no text layer to read. OCR is needed first (Acrobat Pro, Tesseract, or "Open with Google Docs"). Once OCR has run, bring the resulting text-native PDF back here.
Acrobat Pro's Export to Excel is excellent and does layout-aware detection that handles complex tables better than our heuristic — but it costs $19.99/month and uploads to Adobe Document Cloud by default. For one-off copies, or when you want nothing to leave your device, the browser tool is faster: drop, download, move on. Clean up a few cells in Excel if needed.