How to copy a table from PDF to Excel

You select a table in a PDF, paste it into Excel, and everything lands in column A. This happens because a PDF does not know about cells. It only knows where each word sits on the page. Here are four ways to get the table into Excel with columns that make sense, from quickest to most reliable.

Which way to choose

1. Copy and paste, then split the columns

This works when the table is short and the PDF has real text (you can select words in it).

1. Open the PDF, select the table rows and press Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on a Mac).
2. Click a cell in Excel and press Ctrl+V. Usually each row lands in one cell.
3. Keep the pasted cells selected and go to Data > Text to Columns. Choose Delimited, tick Space, and finish.

The catch: a value with a space inside, like a name or a date such as "Oct 3", gets split into two columns. You then fix those rows by hand.

2. Excel: Get Data from PDF

Excel for Microsoft 365 on Windows can read tables from a PDF on its own. Go to Data > Get Data > From File > From PDF, pick the file, and Excel shows a list of the tables it found. Select one and click Load.

It works well on PDFs created from a computer. It does not read scans, and it is not available in Excel for Mac or older Excel versions.

3. Adobe Acrobat: export to spreadsheet

In Acrobat Pro, open the PDF and choose Export a PDF > Spreadsheet > Microsoft Excel Workbook. Acrobat converts the whole document, text and all, so you often need to clean up rows around the table. It needs a paid Acrobat plan; the free Acrobat Reader cannot export.

4. Extract the table and download an Excel file

A table extractor looks only for tables and skips the rest of the page. With Extract Table from PDF it takes three steps:

1. Upload the PDF.
2. Click Extract. The tool finds every table, also tables without lines.
3. Click Export to Excel. Each table gets its own sheet.

If the PDF is a scan, the tool recognizes the text first (OCR). For crooked scans or tables with merged cells, deep extraction reads the page like a person does; you see one page of the result before you pay.

Check the result before you use it

• Compare the row count with the PDF, especially on the first and last page.
• Sum a column with numbers and compare it with the total printed in the PDF.
• If numbers show up as text (aligned left), select the column and use Data > Text to Columns > Finish to turn them into numbers.

Need the data in a different format? See how to convert a PDF to CSV or how to get a PDF table into Google Sheets.

Questions and answers