Question 1

How can it find tables when a PDF has no tables?

Accepted Answer

It cannot read them, so it measures them. A PDF stores glyph runs with a position each — the ruled lines you see are separate drawing operations, and nothing in the file says a cell exists. Rows come from shared baselines, which is how the page was typeset. Columns come from the horizontal span each cell occupies: cells whose spans overlap are the same column, and a span that recurs on several rows is a column rather than an indent.

Question 2

Can I add up the numbers afterwards?

Accepted Answer

Yes — a cell that holds a plain number is stored as a number, not as text, so SUM works on the column straight away. The source's decimal places are kept as a display format, so a price written 48.50 still reads 48.50 rather than 48.5. What deliberately stays text is anything where the formatting is information: a leading zero, a thousands separator, a date, a phone number. Coercing those would quietly destroy them.

Question 3

Why is each page its own sheet?

Accepted Answer

Because a page break in a report is usually a table break, and the header row repeats on the next page. Two sheets are easy to join if they turn out to be one table; a single sheet with header rows buried in the middle of it is not easy to take apart.

Question 4

What happens to a page that is not a table?

Accepted Answer

It comes back as one column of lines. That is deliberate: inventing columns from a paragraph that happens to be indented would produce a grid that looks like a table, and someone would trust it. A page only becomes a grid when at least two column positions recur across several rows.

Question 5

Which tables does it get wrong?

Accepted Answer

Three kinds, all for the same reason — the geometry is ambiguous. A cell whose text wraps onto a second line becomes a second row, because the two lines share nothing but their column. A merged cell lands in the first column it spans. And a cell that is empty in the PDF is empty here, so a table that relies on blank cells to mean "same as above" arrives with the blanks.

Question 6

Does it work on a scanned table?

Accepted Answer

No, and it says so rather than returning something plausible. Recognition gives one line of text per detection box, and those boxes merge neighbouring cells often enough that the grid would be wrong in ways that are hard to spot. Running OCR PDF first makes the text extractable, but a scanned table is the case to check by hand whatever tool you use.

Question 7

Is it really free?

Accepted Answer

Yes — every conversion on this site, with no account, no watermark and no daily cap. The work happens on your own device, so there is no server bill for us to pass on to you.

Question 8

Do I need to install anything?

Accepted Answer

No. It runs in any modern browser, on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. There is nothing to download and nothing to sign up for, and once the page has loaded it keeps working with the network switched off.

PDF to Excel converter

FAQ