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.Ģ.

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

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