« How to Scan and OCR Concurrently
Examining Fonts in a PDF File »

Export PDF Tables to Microsoft Excel

You can easily convert tables in a PDF file to Excel. This is generally a good idea if you’re making extensive changes to the tables. To do so:

  1. Open your PDF file that contains a table
  2. Choose the select tool by going to Tools > Select and Zoom > Select Tool
  3. Highlight the table in your PDF file
  4. Right click (or control click on Mac) on the selected table and choose Open Table in Spreadsheet.
  5. Microsoft Excel (or your default spreadsheet program) will open showing you the table
  6. You should note that the table formatting will not always be identical. This depends on how the PDF was originally made.
  7. Instead of choosing Open Table in Spreadsheet, you can also pick Copy as Table if you want to paste the table into Word or another program. You can also choose Save as Table, which will save the table as a CSV (Comma Separated Value) file that can be opened with Excel.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

13 Responses to “Export PDF Tables to Microsoft Excel”

  1. this doesn’t work with Mac’s Preview. I’m installing Adobe Reader just hoping that it’ll work.

  2. This only works for 1 page at a time. I have a 600+ page pdf that I need to work with in Excel (specifically to sort). How can I export to Excel more efficiently?

  3. I am having the identical problem- hundreds of pages of tables, which can be exported only a page at a time. This is a significant problem for me.

  4. Has anyone found a solution for exporting to Excel all the data from a multi-page PDF file?

  5. I too have just discovered this very frustrating problem with Acrobat’s handling of tables across multiple pages. Impossible! Was hoping to find a solution here…

  6. Even on my 10 page pdf this method is pretty inconvenient. Feel sorry for you guys with 100 page documents. :-/

  7. Solving this mulitple page copy problem would be significant for many many many many many users, but as usual Adobe is indifferent to a problem they did not discover or that does not exist in their navel viewing world. I seem to remember that this problem was solved many versions back from version 8. I thought it was the case that if you were on continous page that you could copy from multiple pages. But, this no longer works as best as I can tell. Hey Adobe, you could multiple sales by at least 2 or 3 if you could fix this and even advertise it. Hey Adobe, people work with lists all the ^#**^*^)^%$$# time. Get a clue. Take a clue. Fix it.

  8. I’ve found this work around to work sometimes.
    Run in Adobe Document>Recognize Text Using OCR
    Then Select All(Ctrl+A) this will take a few seconds.
    Then Copy All(Ctrl+C)

    Then go to Excel and Paste(Ctrl+V) the data into a Worksheet.
    Ok you should have all of the pages in one column. But sometimes it pastes into excel in separate columns. Which is nice since it is the end result.

    But if it is all in one column use the next step.
    Finally in Excel go to Data>Text to Columns>Delimited>then check mark Tab & Space. Ok now you are done other than a little clean up. Hope this helps someone.

  9. Hey Derik,

    You have a very good suggestin and hope this will solve a great problem for lot more people in this field trying to get the solutin.

    You may not imagine how many people are looking to get the solution of this problem.

    Many people spent lot of money buying software claiming this solutions but failed to get the perfect result so far.

    Thanks a lot for sharing this informaiton to all.

  10. Hi Derik,
    Thanks a lot.
    The work around is useful and it solves 70% of the problem.

  11. This website will detect all tables in a PDF file, and then extract each separate table into a single Excel file. Superb quality too.

    http://www.pdftoexcelonline.com.

    Oh, and it’s free.

  12. The website Chris mentioned is great, but it only works if the table is simple and has all borders, mine didn’t.
    What I ended up using is a program called PDF2XL ( http://www.cogniview.com ) which is much more flexible. Their trial version is not limited in ability!

  13. Very useful work arounds indeed, but of course only if the data witheld in the pdf document is the original data printed as a pdf.
    If the data is from a pasted image source, you’ve got buckley’s chance of making this work. This is a REAL pain in the rear end I’m afraid!!

Leave a Reply