PDF to Excel

Retyping tables from PDF reports into Excel is slow and error-prone. If the source PDF was digitally created — from accounting software, a bank export, or a business system — the table data is already encoded as text and can be extracted into a real spreadsheet.

Results are much better on digital PDFs than scanned ones. For scanned tables, run OCR PDF first to add a text layer, then convert. Expect some cleanup — merged cells, headers, and totals sometimes need manual adjustment — but it's still faster than typing everything from scratch.

After conversion, always verify key numbers against the source document before running calculations. Column alignment is the most common issue to check.