Tabula did very well on PDFs of low or moderate complexity, although it did have an issue with the complex one (as did many of the paid platforms). And it has both a command-line and a browser interface, making it equally useful for batch conversions and point-and-click use. Unlike some free options from the Python world, Tabula is easy both to install and to use. If you’re looking for free and open source, give Tabula a try. For those who want to automate, using this API is more complicated than some other options.īottom line: An excellent choice if you don’t mind the AWS setup and either manual upload or coding with a complex API. Pros: Best option tested for a complicated scanned PDF performed extremely well on all the app-generated PDFs offers a choice of viewing results with merged or unmerged cell layout easy to use affordable.Ĭons: Uploaded files are limited to 10 pages at a time. Rating: Excellent - this was our best option for a complicated scanned PDF.Ĭost: 1.5 cents per page (100 pages per month free for your first three months at AWS) You just need to sign up for a (free) Amazon AWS account. While you certainly can go through the usual multi-step AWS setup and coding process for Textract, Amazon also offers a drag-and-drop web demo that lets you download results as zipped CSVs. Amazon AWS Textractįor an AWS cloud service, Textract is surprisingly easy to use. Pros: Outstanding results preserves much of the original formatting deals well with tables spanning multiple pages unlimited conversions of files up to 100MB affordable for frequent users.Ĭons: No built-in scripting/automation workflow expensive if you only convert a few documents a year.īottom line: If you don’t need to script or automate a lot of conversions and don’t mind paying $24 per year, this is a great choice. Rating: Excellent - our hands-down winner for non-scanned PDFs. This can be a benefit if you’d like to keep that context or a drawback if you just want data for additional analysis. The Excel conversions include any text on pages that have both text and tables. (You can output Microsoft Word files with this tool as well). A full-featured conversion subscription is somewhat pricey, but there’s also an inexpensive $2/month plan (annual subscription required) that includes an unlimited number of PDF to Excel conversions. All these tools did pretty well on at least some of our tasks, so rankings range from “Excellent” to “Good.” Adobe Acrobat Export PDF subscriptionĪs the creator of the Portable Document Format standard, you’d expect Adobe to do well in parsing PDFs - and it does. Here are the tools we tested, starting with our overall best performers (but remember that “best” depends in part on the specific source document). You’ll see how all the tools perform in each scenario - and find out the strengths and weaknesses of each one. To help you find what’s best for your tasks, we tested seven PDF to Excel conversion tools using four different PDF files ranging from simple to nightmare. In addition, as with any software choice, you need to decide how much you value performance versus cost and ease of use. ![]() Do I have a large volume of files that need batch file conversions or automation? Our best-performing tool on app-generated PDFs may not be the best choice for you if you want to automate frequent batch conversions. Things get more complicated if tables are spread over multiple pages, table cells are merged, or some data within a table cell wraps over multiple lines.ģ. How complex is the data structure? Almost every tool will work well on a simple one-page table. Not all PDF conversion tools work on scanned PDFs. If a click and drag works to highlight text, your PDF is app-generated. ![]() You can tell which one you have by trying to highlight some text in the document. One is generated by an application like Microsoft Word the other comes from a scanned or other image file. Was my PDF generated by an application or is it a scanned image? There are two types of PDF files. There are several important considerations when selecting a PDF converter.ġ. 3 questions to ask when choosing a PDF to Excel converter Which is the “best” PDF to Excel converter? As with the “best computer,” the answer depends on your specific circumstances. There’s software from major vendors like Microsoft and Adobe, task-specific cloud services including PDFTables and Cometdocs, services from general-purpose cloud providers such as Amazon, and even free open-source options. How to extract that data from PDFs into an Excel spreadsheet? You have a number of PDF to Excel converters to choose from. In the world we live in, though, a lot of valuable data is locked inside Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. In an ideal world, the data we need to analyze would be available in ready-to-use format.
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