How to convert PDF to Excel
- 1
Click Choose files or drag one or more PDFs into the box above.
- 2
Click Convert. Tables are detected on each page and laid out in rows and columns.
- 3
The .xlsx file downloads automatically, with one sheet per PDF page. Several files can be saved with Download all (ZIP).
- 4
Open it in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice Calc and check the headers.
Why convert PDF tables to Excel?
PDFs are where data goes to be read, not used. Retyping figures is slow and error-prone; copy-pasting from a PDF usually dumps a whole table into a single column. Converting to Excel gives you real cells:
- Bank and credit card statements — categorise expenses, build a budget, prepare taxes.
- Invoices and price lists — import supplier prices or reconcile orders.
- Financial reports — reuse published figures in your own analysis.
- Exported reports from systems that only offer PDF.
What converts well
| PDF content | Result |
|---|---|
| Clean tables with one header row | Rows and columns as in the PDF |
| Statements and invoices from banking or accounting software | Usually good — check dates and amounts |
| Merged or multi-level headers | Data is there; headers may need rearranging |
| Scanned pages | Not supported — no text to read |
Tips for a clean spreadsheet
- Convert only the pages with tables. Extract them with Split PDF to avoid sheets full of cover-page text.
- Check decimal and date formats. If your PDF uses commas as decimal separators, make sure Excel’s regional settings match before calculating.
- Need the text, not the table? PDF to Word is better for reports that are mostly paragraphs.
- Going the other way? Turn a spreadsheet into a shareable document with Excel to PDF.
Financial documents are among the most sensitive files you own. With TurboConvert, the conversion happens in your browser — the PDF is never sent to a server.
Common problems and fixes
Everything ended up in one column. The PDF probably lays out its “table” with spaces rather than real columns, or the page is a scan. Check that you can select individual words in the PDF; if not, it is an image and cannot be converted to cells.
Numbers are left-aligned and won’t add up. Excel treats them as text — often because of a currency symbol, a trailing minus sign or a thousands separator from another locale. Use Data › Text to Columns or find-and-replace the symbol, and Excel recognises them as numbers.
Dates are wrong (day and month swapped). Your PDF and your spreadsheet use different date conventions (03/04 can be March 4 or April 3). Set the column’s date format in Excel to match the source.
A table continues over several pages. Each page becomes its own sheet. Copy the rows of the following sheets under the first one to rebuild the full table, then delete the repeated header rows.
Some header cells are shifted. Headers that span several columns in the PDF are hard to map to a grid. Move them into place by hand; the data rows underneath are usually aligned correctly.