Getting data out of a PDF
Bank statements, invoices, price lists, and exported reports often arrive as PDFs even though the useful part is a table. You cannot sort it, total it, or filter it while it is a PDF. Converting to Excel puts the content into cells so you can work with it — which is usually far faster than retyping it.
How the conversion works
PDF Studio reads every piece of text in the PDF along with its position on the page. Text that sits on the same line becomes a row, and gaps between pieces of text start a new column. Each page of the PDF is written to its own sheet in the workbook, named Page 1, Page 2, and so on, and the result is a standard .xlsx file that opens in Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice.
The conversion runs in your browser, so the PDF is not uploaded.
What to expect from the output
Results are best for PDFs with clear, regular tables made from real text. Cells arrive as text, so numbers and dates are not automatically formatted — in Excel you may need to convert a column to numbers (for example with Text to Columns or the “Convert to Number” prompt) before you can sum it. Tables whose columns are very close together may merge into one cell, and a table that continues over several pages will be spread across several sheets.
Merged cells, borders, colors, and charts in the PDF are not reproduced; only the text is extracted.
Scanned PDFs and cleanup
A scanned PDF is a picture, so there is no text to extract; run OCR PDF first and convert the result. After converting, spend a minute checking column alignment, and consider using Excel’s Data tools to clean up. For documents that are mostly paragraphs rather than tables, PDF to Word is usually a better fit.