How to Convert a PDF Table to Excel on a Mac (One Sheet per Table)
You have a bank statement, a report or an invoice as a PDF, and you need the numbers in Excel. You select the table, copy it, paste it, and every row lands in a single column, or two columns merge into one. It is one of the most common spreadsheet annoyances, and it is worse when a PDF holds several tables.
Why copy and paste from a PDF goes wrong
A PDF stores text as positioned characters on a page. It has no idea that a block of text is a table with rows and columns. When you copy it, Excel has to guess where one cell ends and the next begins, and it often guesses wrong. The fix is a converter that looks for the lines and spacing that make up a table and rebuilds the rows and columns.
Convert a PDF to Excel in three steps
Open our PDF to Excel converter and upload your PDF. You can drag it in or choose the file.
Wait a few seconds while it finds the tables and builds the workbook.
Sign in with Google and download the .xlsx file.
You can upload and see the result before you sign in. Signing in is only needed to download.
What you get
Every table the converter finds is written to its own worksheet in the same workbook, named by table number and page, for example Table 1 (p1) and Table 2 (p3). Plain numbers are written as real numbers, not text, so you can sort, filter and add them straight away. The first row of each sheet is bold, and columns are sized to fit.
Files can be up to 10 MB and 100 pages. Scanned PDFs, which are really pictures of pages, are not supported yet, because they need text recognition first.
Tips for cleaner results
Tables with clear lines or consistent column alignment convert best.
If you can select the text in your PDF with the cursor, it will usually work. If you cannot, it is probably a scan.
Split very large PDFs into smaller parts if you only need a few pages.
After converting, check a couple of totals against the original PDF before you rely on the numbers.
Tidy the workbook faster
Once the data is in Excel, a few shortcuts save a lot of clicking: paste values with Alt E S V, auto-fit column widths with Alt H O I, and toggle filters with Alt A T. On a Mac those become ⌥ E S V, ⌥ H O I and ⌥ A T with the Mac Excel Shortcuts app. Our printable cheat sheet lists them all.
Your file stays private
The PDF is processed in memory and the converted file is deleted after you download it. We do not store or read your documents.