Question 1

How does PDF to Excel work?

Accepted Answer

The converter reads the PDF's text layer in your browser, clusters the text into rows by vertical position, then finds column boundaries by looking for horizontal gaps wider than the typical character width. Each page with a detected table becomes one worksheet in the downloaded .xlsx file.

Question 2

Are my files uploaded anywhere?

Accepted Answer

No. PDF to Excel runs entirely in your browser. Your files never leave your device. That matters for bank statements, invoices and payroll tables, which are the documents people most often need to get into a spreadsheet.

Question 3

Will it work on a scanned PDF?

Accepted Answer

No. A scanned page is an image with no text layer, so there is nothing to extract and the converter will tell you so rather than producing an empty file. Run OCR first to add a text layer, then convert.

Question 4

How accurate is the table detection?

Accepted Answer

It is a heuristic, not a layout engine. Clean tables with consistent column spacing convert well. Merged cells, nested tables, multi-line cells and columns separated by less than about two and a half characters of space are where it degrades — you may get cells joined or split in the wrong place. Check the output against the source before relying on it.

Question 5

Are numbers imported as numbers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but conservatively. A cell becomes a numeric cell only when its text round-trips exactly through a number conversion and fits inside 15 significant digits. Values like 007, 1.50 and 12/05/2026 stay as text so leading zeros, trailing decimals and dates are not silently rewritten by the spreadsheet. Anything longer than 15 digits stays text too, because Excel keeps only 15 significant digits and zeroes the rest — that is what would otherwise turn a 16-digit card or account number into a wrong one.

Question 6

What is not carried over?

Accepted Answer

Formatting, colours, merged cells, images and formulas are not carried over — the output is plain cell values, one sheet per page. Formulas do not exist in a PDF to begin with, since a PDF stores the rendered result rather than the calculation.

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