How to Convert a PDF to Excel Without Making a Complete Mess of It

Got a PDF full of tables or data that really ought to be in Excel? Sometimes converting it is straightforward. Sometimes you open the result and discover the columns have wandered off, dates have become nonsense and half the information appears to have gone on holiday.

Here’s how to convert a PDF to Excel, what to check afterwards, and what to do when the job becomes more faff than it’s worth.

The easiest way to convert a PDF to Excel

If you have a recent version of Microsoft Excel, you may be able to import data directly from a PDF.

Open a blank Excel workbook.
Go to Data.
Choose Get Data, then From File and From PDF.
Select your PDF.
Excel will show the tables and data it can detect.
Select the table you need and choose Load, or Transform Data if it needs tidying first.

For a clean PDF containing proper tables, that can be all you need.

What if Excel can’t read the PDF properly?

PDFs are designed to preserve how a document looks, not necessarily to store information in neat spreadsheet-shaped rows and columns. That means a table that looks perfectly sensible on screen can turn into a small administrative crime scene when it is extracted.

Common problems include:

several columns being combined into one;
one column being split into several;
headings appearing in the middle of the data;
dates or numbers being imported as text;
blank rows and repeated page headers;
missing or incorrectly ordered information.

Scanned PDFs are different

If the PDF is actually a scan or photograph of a document, there may be no underlying text or table for Excel to extract. The document first needs optical character recognition (OCR) to turn the image into usable text.

OCR can be extremely useful, but it is not infallible. Numbers, decimal points, dates and similar-looking characters can be misread, so important data should always be checked against the original.

Check the Excel file before you rely on it

However you convert the PDF, don’t assume that a successful-looking conversion is an accurate one. Check a sample against the original PDF, especially totals, dates, decimal values and long reference numbers.

It is also worth checking for duplicated headers, missing rows, numbers stored as text and columns that have shifted out of alignment.

When doing it yourself stops making sense

Converting one clean table from a short PDF may take a couple of minutes. Converting dozens of files, hundreds of pages or badly structured tables can become a completely different job.

The same applies when the data needs more work afterwards: combining files, removing duplicates, standardising dates, separating fields, filtering records or restructuring everything into one usable spreadsheet.

Can’t be faffed?

If you’ve got a large PDF, multiple files, awkward tables or data that needs cleaning once it reaches Excel, you don’t have to spend your afternoon fighting with it.

Faff It Off. Send us what you’ve got, tell us what you need at the end, and we’ll quote for sorting it for you.