A financial report has the data you need but it's a PDF. Copy-pasting a table from PDF to Excel almost always mangles it — columns merge, rows split, numbers fuse into text.
Dedicated table extraction handles the structure. Each row becomes a row. Each column stays a column.
Convert PDF to Excel directly
Use Flint's PDF to Excel converter. It detects table structures and outputs an .xlsx with proper rows and columns.
The whole conversion takes a few seconds. Tables come through with cell boundaries intact.
Clean up after conversion
Conversion isn't always perfect. Check the headers — sometimes the title row gets split or merged into a row above. Numbers stored as text need a column conversion in Excel.
For mostly-numeric tables, recognition is highly accurate. For tables with lots of nested headers or footnotes, expect some manual fixing.
If the source is a scan
Scanned tables need OCR first. Run OCR on the PDF before converting to Excel. Recognition accuracy on table data is roughly 90-95% for clean scans.
For tabular data extracted from scans, always spot-check totals — small recognition errors in a column of numbers add up.
FAQ
Does it handle merged cells?
Usually. Merged cells in the source PDF come through as merged cells in Excel, with some best-effort interpretation when the merge spans rows and columns.
What about multi-page tables?
Most extraction tools treat each page's table as separate. Manual stitching in Excel may be needed for tables that span pages.
Will formulas be preserved?
No — PDFs don't carry formulas. Extracted values come through as literal numbers. Re-add formulas in Excel as needed.
Can I extract just one table from a multi-table PDF?
Convert the whole PDF, then keep just the sheet or range you want. Splitting at the source PDF level isn't usually necessary.
Table extraction beats copy-paste every time. Use Flint's PDF to Excel converter and the data lands in a real spreadsheet.