How to convert a PDF to Excel
Open your PDF above and you get every page's rows on one sheet. Read the totals check before you download: it compares the report's printed totals with its rows. Scanned PDFs (pictures of paper pages) need text recognition (OCR) first.
What lands in each cell
You put a report in Excel to add it up. SUM ignores text cells, so one amount stored as text makes your total wrong.
In the PDF
07/09/2026 T-10452 Main St clinic Replace compressor, recharge 1,180.00
07/30/2026 T-10533 Main St clinic Warranty credit, T-10452 (180.00)
In the Excel sheet
| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Date | Ticket | Location | Service | Amount |
| 2 | 07/09/2026 | T-10452 | Main St clinic | Replace compressor, recharge refrigerant | 1180 |
| 3 | 07/30/2026 | T-10533 | Main St clinic | Warranty credit, T-10452 | -180 |
In this tool, every amount becomes a number cell: thousands commas, $, € and £ signs come off, and a trailing minus or a credit in parentheses, the way accountants print negatives, becomes a minus sign. Number cells have no format yet, so 1,180.00 shows as 1180 until you give the column one.
Anything that isn't a number stays text. So does a column of codes where any code has a leading zero or more than 15 digits, the same rule as our CSV to Excel converter: 00123 stays 00123, and a 16-digit ID keeps every digit. Dates stay as printed. To sort by date, use DATEVALUE: it turns a text date into a real one, reading it by your computer's date setting. Then give the column a date format so it shows as a date.
Can Excel convert a PDF on its own?
Yes. Excel's Power Query has a PDF connector. It finds the tables in a PDF, joins similar tables on consecutive pages by default, and lets you load the ones you pick or shape them first in the Power Query Editor.
Use Power Query when you'd rather build the import yourself, inside Excel. Use this tool when you want one sheet in a minute, with the amounts already numbers and the report's totals already compared with its rows.
Does the sheet add up?
The tool adds up the rows above each Total or Subtotal line and shows that sum next to the figure the PDF prints. When they don't match, here's where to look.
The Total lines stay in the sheet as rows, so leave them out when you add up a column.
What changes between the PDF and the sheet
- The sheet is named after the file.
- The column header becomes the bold top row, frozen so it stays in view as you scroll.
- The report title and other lines above the header are left out.
It reads PDFs that have text in them, up to 50 MB, the same way the PDF to CSV converter does. Use that one when the data is headed for an import that takes CSV.
When the sheet is a new customer's history
Sometimes the only thing a new customer's legacy system produces is a PDF, laid out for a printer, not a spreadsheet: rows wrap across pages, and totals sit in between the records.
If you run onboarding at a software company, one report is a job for this tool. Moving a new customer's whole history, every report from the system they're leaving, is what we do at Rubie. We handle PDFs that run to hundreds of pages, and our Migration Playbooks move that history into your product without engineering time. Granum put it this way: "We've had (customers) who give us those 250 page PDFs, and in the past we couldn't even work with them, but now we have Rubie."
