How to Easily Extract Data from PDF to Excel: A Comprehensive Guide

PDFs are one of the most common file formats used today for sharing documents. The Portable Document Format was developed by Adobe in the early 1990s as a way to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system used to create or view the file.

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PDFs are great for preserving document formatting and ensuring that a file appears the same way to every viewer. However, that fixed formatting can also make extracting and editing the data contained in a PDF more difficult compared to other file types. If you‘ve ever tried to copy and paste a table from a PDF into Excel, you‘ve likely encountered formatting issues where the data doesn‘t get divided into the proper rows and columns.

Luckily, there are several ways to more easily extract data from PDF files into Excel. In this guide, we‘ll walk through multiple methods so you can choose the approach that works best for your needs, whether you only need to convert the occasional PDF or you routinely need to extract data from dozens or hundreds of PDF files.

Method 1: Copy and Paste

If you only have a few PDF files to extract data from, copying and pasting can be a simple solution. The process is fairly straightforward:

Open the PDF file in a PDF reader application
Use your cursor to select the data you want to copy. For a table, click and drag to select the entire table.
Right-click on the highlighted data and choose "Copy" from the menu (or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C on Windows or Cmd+C on Mac)
Open a blank Excel spreadsheet
Click on the cell where you want the copied data to begin
Right-click and select "Paste" from the menu (or use Ctrl+V / Cmd+V)

In some cases, the pasted data may not be formatted correctly as an Excel table. This often happens if there were spaces between the columns in the original PDF. To fix this:

Select the pasted data in Excel
Go to the "Data" tab in the ribbon menu
Look for "Text to Columns" and click on it
Select "Delimited" and click Next
Check the box for "Space" under Delimiters
Click Finish

This will separate the data into columns everywhere there was a space, which should properly format it as a table.

Pros of copying and pasting:

Quick and easy for small numbers of files
Does not require any additional software

Cons of copying and pasting:

Can be tedious for extracting data from many files
May not preserve original formatting
Only works for copying text, not images

Method 2: Export Data Using Your PDF Application

Some PDF applications have built-in tools for exporting PDF data into other file formats like Excel. The exact process will depend on which application you‘re using. Here are the steps for a few popular PDF readers:

Adobe Acrobat DC:

Open the PDF file in Acrobat
Right-click on the file name in the left-hand menu and choose "Export PDF"
Select "Spreadsheet" as the export format
Choose "Microsoft Excel Workbook" from the spreadsheet format dropdown
Click Export and choose a location and file name to save the new Excel file

PDF Reader Pro:

Open the PDF in PDF Reader Pro
Go to the "File" menu and choose "Export To"
Select "Excel"
Choose a location to save the exported file

Foxit Reader:

Open your PDF in Foxit Reader
Go to "File" > "Export"
Choose the "To MS Office" tab
Select "Excel" as the export format

Not all PDF applications will include an export option, as it is considered a more advanced feature. It‘s more commonly found in paid PDF tools vs. free readers.

The other limitation is that most PDF export tools will only allow you to export the entire file into Excel. So if you only need data from certain pages or sections, you‘ll need to copy and paste those parts into a new Excel file after exporting.

Pros of using your PDF application‘s export tool:

A fast way to convert an entire PDF document to Excel
Preserves formatting reasonably well in most cases

Cons of exporting from PDF applications:

Not available in all PDF readers
Generally limited to exporting the full document rather than a selection

Method 3: Use a Dedicated PDF to Excel Converter

For more advanced PDF to Excel conversions, your best bet is using a dedicated tool built specifically for the task. There are a number of both desktop and web-based applications that allow you to convert PDFs into Excel, CSVs, and other spreadsheet-friendly formats.

Here are a few well-regarded PDF to Excel converters to consider:

Nitro PDF to Excel

Nitro is a comprehensive PDF productivity platform. In addition to PDF to Excel conversions, it also has tools for PDF creation, editing, signing, and more. The Excel export supports both XLS and XLSX formats.

Able2Extract

Able2Extract was one of the first PDF to Excel converters on the market and remains a solid, reliable choice. It allows you to extract all pages or only certain pages from a PDF into Excel. One standout feature is the ability to automatically detect and extract just tables from PDFs.

Adobe Export PDF

While we previously covered exporting PDFs from within Acrobat itself, Adobe also offers an online Export PDF tool that allows you to convert PDFs into Excel, Word, or images. It‘s very easy to use—just drag and drop your PDF file or select it from your computer or Adobe Document Cloud storage.

Smallpdf

Smallpdf is a web-based PDF conversion platform with a clean, user-friendly interface. The PDF to Excel tool preserves your formatting and allows you to convert your first two documents per day for free. If you need to do more conversions, you can upgrade to the $12/month Pro plan.

Extracting Data from Image-Based or Scanned PDFs

One common issue when trying to extract PDF data into Excel is that you can‘t select or copy the text. This usually indicates an image-based PDF, which is essentially a picture of the text rather than the text itself. Image PDFs are most commonly created through scanning a physical document.

To pull text and data from an image PDF, you‘ll need to use a technique called optical character recognition (OCR). OCR tools analyze the image to detect letters and numbers, converting it into machine-readable and searchable text.

Adobe Acrobat has built-in OCR functionality. To use it:

Open the scanned PDF file in Acrobat
Go to "Tools" > "Enhance Scans"
Select the file you want to convert and click "Enhance"
Once it finishes the text recognition, you can use the regular PDF export steps covered in Method 2 to convert it to Excel

If you don‘t have access to Acrobat, there are a number of free online OCR tools that can convert a scanned PDF into a file with selectable text. Some options include:

Onlineocr.net
Convertio
OCR.space
New OCR

Once you‘ve used OCR to convert the PDF into a document with extractable text, you can use any of the methods covered in this guide to export it to Excel.

Extracting Tables from PDFs

Sometimes you don‘t need all of the data from a PDF—just certain tables. Extracting just tables can be tricky, as PDF to Excel converters will pull all of the data, and other methods like copying and pasting may not properly format the tables.

If you have Adobe Acrobat, try using these steps to extract a table:

Open the PDF in Acrobat
Choose the "Export PDF" tool
Select the "Spreadsheet" option
Under "Select", choose "Tables" instead of "Entire Document"
Click "Export" and choose where to save the file

For a free, web-based option, check out Tabula. Here‘s how to use it:

Go to Tabula.technology in your web browser
Click "Select File" and choose your PDF
Once it loads, select the pages you want to extract tables from
Click the "Preview & Export Extracted Data" button
Tabula will try to automatically detect tables. You can use the selection box to fix any incorrect guesses.
Once your table is properly selected, choose "Download" to export it as a CSV

Using Python to Extract PDF Data

If you‘re comfortable with Python and need a more automated solution for pulling data from PDFs, there are libraries you can use to write scripts for PDF to Excel conversions. This can be a good approach if you routinely need to extract data from a large number of similarly formatted PDFs.

Some popular Python libraries for working with PDFs include:

PyPDF2 for extracting document info and text
tabula-py (Python wrapper for the Tabula tool covered earlier) for pulling tables
pdfplumber for extracting text, tables, and images
PDFMiner for parsing and analyzing text

Here‘s a basic example script using PyPDF2 to extract all of the text from a PDF:

import PyPDF2

# Open the PDF file
pdf_file = open(‘example.pdf‘, ‘rb‘)

# Create a PDF reader object
pdf_reader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdf_file)

# Extract text from each page and print it
for page in range(pdf_reader.numPages):
    page_obj = pdf_reader.getPage(page)
    print(page_obj.extractText())

# Close the PDF file
pdf_file.close()

To use this:

Save the script to a Python file (e.g. pdf_extract.py)
Install PyPDF2 if you haven‘t already (pip install PyPDF2)
Place the PDF you want to extract text from in the same folder as the script
Open a terminal/command prompt window and navigate to the folder
Run the script by entering python pdf_extract.py

This example is just a starting point. You could modify it to write the extracted text to a CSV or Excel file rather than printing to the terminal, add logic to extract tables with tabula-py, or make other enhancements depending on your needs.

The advantage of the Python approach is that it‘s highly customizable and can be automated to process large batches of files without manual intervention. The downsides are that it requires programming knowledge to implement and maintain, and it may not handle more complex formatting as well as dedicated PDF to Excel tools.

Conclusion

We‘ve covered a lot of ground in this guide to extracting data from PDFs into Excel. To recap, your main options are:

Manually copying and pasting for simple extractions from a small number of files
Using the export feature in your PDF application, if it has one
Leveraging dedicated PDF to Excel converter software
Using OCR to pull data from scanned or image-based PDFs
Writing Python scripts to automate bulk extractions

There‘s no one-size-fits-all answer to which method is best. It will depend on the complexity of your PDFs, the volume of files you‘re working with, your budget, and your technical skills.

In general, copy and paste is fine for one-off conversions, while a purpose-built PDF to Excel tool is a good choice for frequent conversions or more advanced needs. Python is the way to go for bulk automated extraction of structured data.

Hopefully the steps and tools outlined in this guide will help make extracting your PDF data into Excel a much more manageable process. The most important thing is taking the time to find a workflow that fits your specific use case. Don‘t be afraid to experiment with multiple approaches until you land on one that meets your needs.