Best Way to Convert PDF to Excel Without Losing Formatting
How to convert PDF to Excel without losing formatting?
How to convert Scanned PDF to Excel and keep formatting?
What’s the best way to convert PDF to Excel without losing formatting?
Can we convert PDF to Excel without changing format for free?
People often encounter the above problems when converting PDF to Excel. Among them, the format issue is the most concerned. The formatting can be distorted after PDF-to-Excel conversion, like rows and columns not working and values not being in the correct cells. It’s feasible to manually adjust them to keep the formatting well, but that takes lots of time and efforts.
To save you from tedious and time-consuming task, this post will show you 6 solutions to convert PDF to Excel without losing formatting, both offline and online in the list.
Cisdem PDF Converter OCR
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 
Free Download macOS 10.14 or later
Considering conversion quality, file security and work efficiency, using a professional PDF converter offline is definitely the best way to convert PDF to Excel without losing formatting. Here Cisdem PDF Converter OCR is highly recommended, which serves your needs well.
This app runs on Mac and Windows, and provides excellent performance when processing conversions between PDF and other file formats. With the help of it, you can easily convert native, scanned and secured PDF files into Excel and keep formatting. To get more accurate results, this converter has provided 3 options for you to extract all content, only table or only text from PDF files to Excel spreadsheets.
Besides Excel, more output formats are supported, like Word, PowerPoint, Images, iWork (Pages, Keynote and Numbers) and more.
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.14 or later
Testing Results:
Here we take one of the imported PDF documents as an example to show you the conversion effect. As is shown in the figure, all the text and data from the PDF are perfectly preserved in the converted Excel Spreadsheet, with no omissions. In addition, the format is almost the same as the original file.
You can also watch this video to convert PDF to Excel without losing formatting quickly.
Although the dedicated PDF to Excel converters offline do yield the best results, online free converters are still more attractive to users. Here we’ve picked out 4 best online PDF to Excel converters to help you convert PDF to Excel for free, while maintaining the original formatting as much as possible. They are listed in order based on the accuracy of the converted Excel file, with the first being the best and the last being the worst.
Able2Extract is available in two offline versions, a free version and a pro version, while its website also provides several free online tools, such as converting PDF to Excel, DWG, Word, HTML, JPG and PowerPoint, create PDF and slim PDF reader. Go to PDF to Excel converter, then you can extract PDF tables into formatted Excel sheets, which are easy to analyze, update and edit. The whole process is completely anonymous, with no email address or account required.
Testing Results:
Look at this comparison image before and after conversion. The information in the original file is basically preserved in the transferred table, and the font is uniform. Users only need to tweak the format slightly.
iLovePDF is a popular web-based PDF editor that includes massive PDF tools in one place. It enables you to perform PDF conversion, manipulate PDF pages, edit content in a PDF and protect PDF with high security. In terms of PDF conversion, it supports exporting PDF to or from Excel, JPG, Word and PowerPoint.
Testing Results:
Less powerful than the above two PDF to Excel converters, this online PDF converter retains all the data information, but there are some formatting errors and the font size is not uniform. It requires users’ manual adjustments.
PDF Converter is a professional online PDF converter that can easily convert many types of files to and from PDF in seconds, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more. Additionally, this online PDF converter does more than converting PDF files, it lets you edit a PDF easily with its suite of tools, from PDF compression and rotation to merging/splitting and protecting PDF.
Testing Results:
The biggest feature of this free PDF-to-Excel converter is that it can only extract tables from PDF into Excel as shown in the figure. Similar to iLovePDF, it also has problems with inconsistent font styles and sizes.
PDFtoExcel.com is an online converter dedicated to turning PDF to Excel. Besides normal PDF files, it works with scanned PDF as well. Additionally, it is totally free without any file conversion limits, and its interface is clean and user-friendly that only takes two or three steps to finish the conversion. However, all files uploaded will be deleted from the server within 6 hours, for the sake of security, any private or sensitive files should not be converted online to avoid information leakage.
Testing Results:
This online site is ranked last, whose conversion quality is not as good. It will lose some data, requiring the user to manually fill in the missing information according to the original file. Additionally, the format of the converted table is very messy. You need to adjust the formatting and remove some blank spaces and symbols that have been added for no reason.
Adobe Acrobat Pro is a highly-esteemed PDF editor with powerful and latest features, which lets you edit, create, convert, sign PDF files and do more on any device. Despite its fabulous features, its prohibitively price has put many people off. The purchase price is US$29.99/mo for the pro version.
If you have installed and subscribed to Adobe Acrobat Pro already, head towards the following guide to convert PDF to Excel without losing formatting with it.
Tip: Before conversion, you can edit, comment, sign and do more on the PDF by selecting the options from Tools menu.
When you are on the fence about buying a PDF converter, here are some suggestions you can consider.
For heavy PDF users, an offline PDF converter is necessary. It enables you to access advanced features and start all types of PDF conversions. For example, Cisdem PDF Converter OCR allows you to perform batch conversion, use OCR technology, adjust conversion settings and more. There are no file limits as online PDF converters do.
Besides, looking for an online alternative to a professional PDF converter each time requires considerable time and effort, not to mention that the alternatives may not be the best choice. They may pose a file security risk or carry viruses, since they mostly do the PDF tasks through third-party services.
In actual fact, users might resort to free online PDF converters due to the high cost of offline PDF converters. However, considering the compelling features, most business opt for paid ones.
Carolyn has always been passionate about reading and writing, so she joined Cisdem as an editor as soon as she graduated from university. She focuses on writing how-to articles about PDF editing and conversion.
