PDF to Excel — Extract Tables to XLSX
Convert PDF tables to Excel locally in your browser. Auto-detects columns by X-coordinate clustering. One sheet per page or combined. No upload, no signup, no watermark.
Drop a PDF file here
Files never leave your browser — conversion runs locally
About this tool
WRRK's PDF-to-Excel converter pulls tabular data out of a PDF and writes it to an editable XLSX file. Extraction uses Mozilla's pdf.js to read text positions per page, then clusters those positions by X-coordinate to detect column boundaries. The resulting rows are written to XLSX using SheetJS. Both libraries run entirely in your browser, so the file never leaves your device.
PDF-to-Excel is one of the harder problems in document conversion because PDFs have no concept of cells — only text painted at specific (x, y) coordinates. WRRK uses a 1D clustering algorithm to infer columns, which works well for clean tabular sources (bank statements, invoices, financial exports) but can't recover from merged cells, multi-column layouts, or scanned images. For those cases, expect to do some cleanup after import. For everything else — quick table extraction without uploading confidential data — this tool is fast, free, and private.
How to convert PDF to Excel (5 steps)
- Drop your PDF. Drag your .pdf into the box, or click Choose PDF file. WRRK reads it locally and shows the page count.
- Pick output layout. Choose 'one sheet per page' for self-contained tables, or 'combined' when one table spans multiple pages.
- Click Convert. Click Convert to Excel. WRRK extracts text positions and clusters columns by X-coordinate. A progress bar shows page-by-page progress.
- Preview. Page 1's first 12 rows preview inline so you can sanity-check the column detection before downloading.
- Download. Click Download .xlsx to save the file. Open in Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice for cleanup.
When to convert PDF to Excel
- Pulling transaction data out of a bank statement PDF
- Re-tabulating an invoice or quote into your own spreadsheet
- Loading PDF-only financial reports into a model or pivot
- Recovering numeric data from a PDF where the source XLSX is lost
- Migrating exported reports from legacy systems into a database
- Comparing two PDF reports — pull both into Excel and diff
- Feeding PDF tables into Pandas or R for analysis
Frequently asked questions
+−How do I convert a PDF to Excel for free?
Drop your PDF into the box and click Convert to Excel. WRRK extracts text positions from each page using pdf.js, clusters them into columns by X-coordinate, and writes the result to an XLSX file with one sheet per page (or combined into one sheet, your choice).
+−Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser using pdf.js and SheetJS. Your file never leaves your device — safe for confidential financial statements, invoices, or client lists.
+−How well does the column detection work?
It works well for clean tabular PDFs — financial statements, bank exports, invoices, exported reports — where columns are visually aligned. It struggles with multi-column documents (newspapers, academic papers), merged cells, and tables with inconsistent indentation. Expect some manual cleanup in Excel after import for complex layouts.
+−Can I convert scanned PDFs (photos of tables)?
No. Scanned PDFs are images and contain no extractable text. WRRK only reads embedded text. To convert a scanned table, run OCR first using Adobe Acrobat, Tesseract, or Google Docs (which OCRs uploaded PDFs), then convert the resulting text-based PDF here.
+−What's the difference between 'one sheet per page' and 'combined'?
One sheet per page creates a separate worksheet inside the XLSX for each PDF page — best when each page is a self-contained table. Combined puts everything into a single worksheet with '-- Page N --' markers between pages — best when one logical table spans multiple pages.
+−Can I convert password-protected PDFs?
No. Encrypted PDFs need to be decrypted first. Open in any reader that accepts the password, save an unprotected copy, then convert.
+−Will the cell values be numbers, or just text?
All extracted cells are stored as text in the XLSX, since pdf.js can't tell whether '1,234' was meant as a number or a label. After importing into Excel, select numeric columns and use Data → Text to Columns or =VALUE() to convert. This is the standard behaviour for every PDF-to-Excel converter.