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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 This depends on how the PDF was originally made.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.

4 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?

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