PDF to Excel

Statements, invoices and reports often come only as PDFs, while budgeting, bookkeeping and reconciliation happen in spreadsheets. PDF to Excel reads the position of every word on each page, works out where the columns are, and writes an .xlsx workbook in which amounts are real numbers and dates are real dates, so sums, filters and sorting work immediately. It is built for text-based PDFs: files downloaded from online banking or accounting software, or exported from Word or Excel.

• Pulling a year of bank or credit card transactions into a sheet to categorise spending.
• Reconciling supplier statements or invoices against your own records.
• Preparing transaction lists for an accountant, a tax return or a loan application.
• Reusing a table from a published report without retyping it.

After you add the file, a preview shows each page with a guide at every detected column boundary, plus the table it will produce. If two columns were merged or one was split, add a guide with Add guide (or double-click the page), drag guides into place, or focus one and press Delete; Detected goes back to the automatic columns. Your guides apply to every page. Sheets sets the layout: One sheet, all pages (the default) stacks everything into a single table, which suits statements; A sheet per page keeps pages apart. Right-aligned cells in the preview are the ones saved as numbers or dates.

• Thousands separators, brackets and trailing minus or Dr for negatives, and percentages become numbers; long digit strings such as account numbers stay as text.
• A date like 03/04/2025 is read day-first or month-first only if other dates in the file settle it; otherwise it stays as text instead of being guessed.
• Each printed line becomes a row, so a description that wraps onto two lines adds a row.
• Password-protected? Unlock it first with Unlock PDF.

A scanned or photographed PDF has no text layer, only pictures of text, so there is nothing to put in cells; the tool tells you when that is the case. For those, convert the pages with PDF to JPG, read them with Image to text (OCR) and check every figure. Merged cells, multi-line rows, side-by-side tables and text running across columns can put values in the wrong column even after you adjust the guides.

• Compare the opening and closing balances and one column total with the PDF.
• Scan the date and amount columns for cells left as text.
• Delete header and footer rows repeated on every page before you sum anything.