Financial reports, invoices, data tables, and spreadsheets frequently get locked into PDF format, making it impossible to sort, filter, calculate, or analyze the data without retyping everything manually. Converting PDF to Excel (XLSX) extracts tabular data from PDF documents and reconstructs it as a functional spreadsheet with rows, columns, and cells that you can immediately work with in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice Calc.

The challenge of PDF-to-Excel conversion lies in the fact that PDFs do not actually contain "tables" — they contain individually positioned text fragments that happen to be arranged in a grid pattern. The converter must analyze the spatial relationships between text elements, detect column boundaries based on alignment, identify row breaks, and group the data into logical cells. This spatial analysis is what makes or breaks the quality of the conversion.

Data trapped in PDF tables cannot be sorted, filtered, or used in formulas. Accountants, financial analysts, and data scientists regularly receive bank statements, financial reports, and government data as PDFs that need to be analyzed in Excel. Manually retyping tables is error-prone and time-consuming — a 50-page financial report with hundreds of rows of data could take hours to retype, and typos in numbers can lead to incorrect analysis.

Excel format also enables data integration. Once the PDF data is in a spreadsheet, you can merge it with other datasets, create pivot tables, build charts, run VLOOKUP formulas, and perform statistical analysis. This transforms a static PDF from a read-only document into actionable data that drives business decisions.

LibreOffice imports the PDF and analyzes the layout to detect tabular structures. Text elements are grouped into cells based on their x/y coordinates and alignment patterns. Column boundaries are determined by consistent vertical alignment of text across multiple rows. Row boundaries are identified by horizontal gaps between text lines. The reconstructed table is written to XLSX format with appropriate cell types — numbers are stored as numeric values, dates are detected and formatted, and text remains as strings. Cell formatting (bold, alignment, borders) is approximated from the PDF's visual styling.

No. PDFs only store the displayed values, not the underlying formulas. The Excel output will contain static numbers. You will need to recreate any formulas manually.

Yes, but with lower accuracy. Borderless tables are detected using text alignment analysis — consistent vertical alignment indicates columns, horizontal gaps indicate rows. This works well for regular grids but may struggle with irregular layouts.

Tables split across pages are combined into a single continuous table in the Excel output when possible. If page headers/footers interrupt the table, they may need to be manually removed from the spreadsheet.

Yes. The converter detects numeric values, currency amounts, and percentages and stores them as Excel number types rather than text strings. This means you can immediately use them in formulas and calculations.

Yes. Each detected table is placed in the spreadsheet. If the PDF contains multiple separate tables per page, they are each extracted independently and placed in the output.

Scanned PDFs require OCR to extract text first. The converter applies OCR automatically when it detects image-only pages, but accuracy depends on scan quality. Clean, high-resolution scans (300+ DPI) produce the best results.

Device	PDF	XLSX
Windows PC	Partial	Partial
macOS	Partial	Partial
iPhone/iPad	Partial	Partial
Android	Partial	Partial
Linux	Partial	Partial
Web Browser	Native	No

Feature	PDF	XLSX
Full Name	Portable Document Format	Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet
Extension	.pdf	.xlsx
Best For	Universal format	Spreadsheet

Convert PDF to Excel — Free Online Converter

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