How to Convert PDF to Excel — Extract Tables and Data Free
Extract tables and numerical data from PDFs into spreadsheets you can actually work with. Here’s what works, what doesn’t and how to get the best results.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Why converting PDF to Excel is tricky
PDFs don’t inherently understand that some content is a “table”. A table in a PDF is just text positioned at specific coordinates — there’s no underlying structure that says “this is a cell” or “this is a row”. Converting it to Excel means inferring that structure from the positions of text items, which is inherently imperfect.
For PDFs with clearly structured table data and good text extraction, the results are excellent. For scanned PDFs or complex multi-column layouts, the results need more manual cleanup.
How to convert PDF to Excel on CuroPDF
Go to curopdf.com/pdf-to-excel
No signup needed.
Upload your PDF
Select the file containing the data you want to extract.
Choose separator
Comma for standard Excel. Semicolon for European Excel locale.
Click Extract to Spreadsheet Now
All text is extracted row by row into CSV format.
Download the CSV
Opens directly in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc.
Opening the CSV in Excel
Double-click the .csv file — Excel usually opens it with correct column separation. If all data appears in one column, use:
Data tab → Text to Columns → Delimited → select Comma (or Semicolon for European) → Finish.
💡 In European versions of Excel (France, Germany, Spain, etc.), the decimal separator is a comma, so standard CSV (comma-separated) conflicts. Re-download using the Semicolon separator option.
What works well vs what doesn’t
- ✅ Works well: financial statements, price lists, simple data tables, structured reports
- ⚠️ Needs cleanup: complex multi-column tables, merged cells, data mixed with narrative text
- ❌ Doesn’t work: scanned PDFs (use OCR first), image-based charts and graphs
For scanned PDFs with data
Use Scan to Text (OCR) first to extract the text content from the scanned image. Once the text is readable, the PDF to Excel conversion can extract the data.
Extract PDF data to Excel now
Free CSV export — opens in Excel, Sheets and Calc
Try PDF to Excel Free →