PDF to Excel

Convert PDF to Excel, with quality

PDFMingo's PDF to Excel tool rebuilds the tables in your PDF as an editable spreadsheet (.xlsx) you can open in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice Calc. The conversion runs on our own secure server using a table-aware engine, so rows and columns land in the right cells instead of being dumped into a single column that you then have to untangle by hand. There is no sign-up, no email and no watermark, and files up to 20 MB are supported.

Numbers arrive as numbers, not text

This is where most PDF to Excel converters fall down. They paste every value in as text, so your totals row will not add up, sorting puts 100 before 20, and every cell carries a little green warning triangle. PDFMingo types each value as it writes it. An amount like 1,234.50 becomes the number 1234.5 displayed with a thousands separator and two decimals. A percentage becomes a real percentage. An accounting negative written as (450.00) becomes -450, the way an accountant expects. Amounts with a currency attached, such as $1,200 or AED 252.00, keep the currency in the cell's number format so the figure stays a number you can sum while still reading correctly on screen.

Just as importantly, values that only look like numbers are left alone. Account numbers, long reference codes, phone numbers and anything with a leading zero stay as text, so a 16-digit account number is not silently rounded off into scientific notation and 007412 does not lose its zeros. Numeric cells are right-aligned automatically, so a converted statement reads like a spreadsheet someone actually built.

Structure that carries across

• Your choice of layout. Keep the whole document flowing down one continuous sheet, or switch the Spreadsheet layout option to give each PDF page its own worksheet, named Page 1, Page 2 and so on, which suits long statements.
• Merged cells. Headers that span several columns in the PDF are merged the same way in Excel.
• Column widths. Columns are sized from the layout of the original, so you are not dragging every boundary before you can read anything.
• Formatting. Bold and italic text, text colour and shaded header rows are carried over, which keeps the table readable at a glance.
• Images. Logos and stamps sitting inside the document are placed in the sheet rather than dropped.

What it works best on

Bank and credit card statements, invoices, purchase orders, price lists, timesheets, inventory reports and exported system reports are the sweet spot. These have clear rows and columns, often with ruling lines, which is exactly what the engine looks for. Tables with no lines at all still convert, because column boundaries are also worked out from how the text is aligned down the page, though a table with irregular spacing and wrapped text inside cells will need a little tidying afterwards.

Pages that are not really tables, such as a paragraph of terms and conditions, will come across as text in cells because there is nothing tabular to reconstruct. If your document is mostly prose rather than figures, PDF to Word is the better tool for it.

Scanned PDFs and OCR

A quick test tells you whether your file will convert: open it and try to select a figure with your cursor. If it highlights, there is real text in the file and the conversion will work. If the cursor just draws a box, your PDF is a photograph or a scan, and the numbers are pixels rather than text. Extracting those needs OCR (optical character recognition), which this tool does not do, so a scanned statement would need to go through OCR software first.

How your file is handled

Table reconstruction is more than a browser can do on its own, so this tool uses a server. Your file travels over an encrypted HTTPS connection to our own machine, never a third party, is converted, and is deleted immediately afterwards. We do not keep a copy, we do not log what is in it, and nothing is shared or sold. Given that bank statements and payroll files are exactly what people convert here, that matters. If you would rather nothing left your device at all, tools like Split PDF and PDF Arranger run entirely in your browser.