How to convert a PDF to Excel

Two things decide it: whether the PDF has real text in it, and which Excel you have. If you can select a single word in the PDF with your cursor, it has text. If a drag selects the whole page as one picture, it's a scan.

Excel's PDF connector, part of Power Query, reads the tables in a PDF and loads the ones you pick into a sheet. Microsoft describes it in one line: it "returns any tables found in a PDF file."

It needs Microsoft 365 on Windows. Microsoft's list of data sources by Excel version ticks PDF for the Microsoft 365 plans only, not for Office 2016 or 2019 bought outright. Excel for Mac doesn't list PDF at all, Excel for the web offers it only for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive for work or school, and Excel for Android and iOS has no Power Query.

Microsoft gives these steps:

A table that runs over several pages comes in as one table. The connector's MultiPageTables option, on unless you change it, "controls whether similar tables on consecutive pages will be automatically combined into a single table."

A long PDF can be slow or time out. Microsoft's advice is to read "pages one at a time or one small range at a time using the StartPage or EndPage options". Those are options of the Pdf.Tables function, which you edit in Power Query's formula bar or Advanced Editor.

For many PDFs with the same layout, Microsoft points to the Folder connector instead: Data > Get Data > From File > From Folder imports the files in a folder and appends them into one table.

This works in every Excel, on Windows or a Mac, and for a short table it is the quickest way. Open the PDF in your PDF reader, select the table's text, copy it, click a cell in Excel and paste.

A pasted table often lands with each whole row in one cell of column A. Microsoft explains why: a PDF "stores a table as a set of lines without any relationship to the content inside the table cells." The copy gives Excel text, not cells. Text to Columns splits it back into columns with these steps:

Figures copied out of a PDF can arrive as text, so SUM skips them. A small green triangle in the top left corner of a cell marks a number stored as text. Select those cells, select the error indicator next to them, and choose Convert to Number. Or, in a new column, =VALUE(A2) returns the number, and Paste Special > Values puts the results over the originals.

Dates split with Text to Columns can come in as text too. In the wizard's last step, select the date column in the Data preview, choose Date under Column data format, and pick the order your PDF writes dates in, such as MDY for 10/21/2026.

Codes need the opposite treatment. Microsoft says Excel "automatically removes leading zeros, and converts large numbers to scientific notation, like 1.23E+15", and keeps only 15 significant digits, so a ZIP code of 02134 becomes 2134 and a long account number loses its end. Make those columns text before the data arrives: Text under Column data format in Text to Columns, or, in Get Data, select Transform Data, select the column, and choose Home > Transform > Data Type > Text. Formatting the column as Text afterwards doesn't bring the zeros back.

Text copied from a PDF can also carry non-breaking spaces, which TRIM leaves alone. How to remove spaces in Excel shows how to find and remove them.

Word can turn a PDF into a document with real tables, and a Word table pastes into Excel one cell per cell. Open the PDF in Word. In Microsoft's words, "Word makes a copy of the PDF, converting it to a Word document and attempting to match layout of the original PDF." The PDF itself stays as it was.

Then select the table in Word, copy it and paste it into Excel. How to convert Word to Excel covers the paste and what to check after it.

It doesn't always work. Microsoft lists "Tables with cell spacing" among the elements that don't convert well, and a page that is mostly charts or graphics can come in as one picture. Converting works best with PDFs that are mostly text.

A scanned PDF is a picture of each page. Get Data reads the tables in a PDF's text and a copy takes text, so a scan gives Excel nothing to read until a tool has recognized the text in it. That's called text recognition, or OCR.

Adobe Acrobat's Export PDF does this as part of the export. Adobe says "If your PDF documents contain scanned text, Acrobat will run text recognition automatically." In Acrobat, open the PDF, click Export PDF in the right pane, choose spreadsheet and then Microsoft Excel Workbook, and click Export. Adobe's pricing page lists exporting to Excel for Acrobat Standard, Pro and Studio; the free Acrobat Reader opens and views PDFs.

Google Drive can recognize text too: right-click the PDF in Drive and click Open with > Google Docs. Google says the file should be 2 MB or smaller, and that "lists, tables, columns, footnotes, and endnotes are not likely to be detected", so expect text to copy, not a table.

Whichever tool reads the scan, check its figures against the page before you use them.

Get the table into Excel by any route above, then save the sheet as CSV. A CSV keeps the values and nothing else: no formatting, formulas or extra sheets. Excel saves only the sheet you have open, so save each sheet you need as its own file.

Microsoft's steps:

The problems that come up most when a PDF goes into Excel, why each happens, and where the fix is on this page.

Event lists, supplier price lists and enquiries that come every week are the same job each time. An Operelio folder has its own email address. Email a PDF to it, and the PDF's first table becomes rows in a CSV in that folder, joined with any table on a later page that carries on under the same header: spring-expo-leads.pdf arrives as spring-expo-leads.csv, with a Source column naming the page and table each row came from. A different table in the same PDF is left out, so send one list per PDF.

A PDF with no table, written out as lines such as Name: Maya Collins and Email: maya.collins@harborlane.example, becomes one row with a column for each field. Anything else becomes one row with its text in a Notes column. A filled-in fillable PDF form becomes one row too, each field a column named by its label.

It reads a PDF's text, not pictures, so a scan is refused, and so is a PDF over 50 pages. Folders are on Starter and above. Download the CSV from Files, or let a trail that watches the folder clean the rows and push them to HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive.