How to convert a PDF to Excel
A bank statement, an invoice or a price list often arrives as a PDF, and the moment you need to total a column or sort by date, a PDF is the wrong format. Converting to Excel puts the text back into rows and columns and turns the amounts into numbers a spreadsheet can calculate with. It runs on your own device, and the file is not uploaded.
Steps
Choose your PDF
Open PDF to Excel and click to choose the file. It is read in your browser. First check that the PDF contains text: if you can select a word in it with your mouse, it will convert. If nothing highlights, it is a scan — a picture of a table — and there is no text in it to put into cells.
Choose one sheet per page, or one sheet for everything
By default each page of the PDF becomes its own sheet, named after the page. For a statement that runs over several pages, turn on "Put all pages on one sheet" instead: every page’s rows end up together, ready to sort and total, with a blank row where each page ended.
Convert and download the .xlsx
Press Convert and download the workbook. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets and other spreadsheet apps. The text is placed in the columns it lines up in on the page — including amounts that are right-aligned — and a table’s header row stays bold.
Check the result before you rely on it
Look at the amounts first. Numbers sit on the right of their cells in a spreadsheet and text on the left, so anything on the left of a money column did not become a number. Then add up a column and compare it with the total printed in the PDF — a closing balance or an invoice total is the quickest way to catch a row that landed in the wrong column.
Common questions
Will the amounts work in formulas?
Yes. Amounts become real numbers — with their thousands separators and decimals, a currency sign like ₱, and negatives written with a minus, in parentheses or with a trailing minus — so SUM, sorting and filtering work straight away. Percentages become percentages.
Why is my account number not a number?
On purpose. An account number, a phone number or a reference with a leading zero is an identifier, not a quantity: made into a number it would lose its leading zero, and one longer than 15 digits would lose its last digits. Those stay as text, exactly as printed. Dates stay as text too, because "03/04" means March or April depending on whose Excel opens it.
Why is part of a description on its own row?
Because it was on its own line in the PDF. When a long description wraps onto a second line, that line has nothing in the other columns, so it becomes a row with only the description filled in, directly under the transaction it belongs to. Join it to the row above if you need it in one cell.
Are the borders, colours and merged cells kept?
No. A PDF only draws a table: the lines and coloured backgrounds are paint on the page, with nothing recording which cells they belonged to. What comes across is the content — the text, the numbers, and bold headers.
My PDF is a scan and nothing came out. Why?
A scanned PDF is a photograph of a document, with no text in it to read. Turning a picture of numbers back into numbers is OCR: run the PDF through OCR PDF on this site first, then convert the result. If only some pages are scans, the other pages still convert and the result says how many were skipped.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. It is read and converted in your browser tab — you can watch your browser’s network tab while it runs. There is no server here to send it to.